A history of community asset ownership by Steve Wyler I would like to thank the Development Trusts Association Board for allowing me to take a research sabbatical in 2007 and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for financial assistance and encouragement.
Steve Wyler
Steve has been Director of the Development Trusts Association since 2000. The Development Trusts Association is a fast growing UK-wide movement, bringing together over 450 community-led organisations, which use self-help, social enterprise, and community asset ownership to bring about long-term social, economic and environmental renewal, and transform their communities for good.
Over the last twenty years Steve has worked for voluntary and community agencies as well as independent grant-makers, including working with homeless agencies during the 1990s; running the Homeless Network, co-ordinating the Rough Sleepers Initiative and setting up Off the Streets and into Work.
Recently Steve has been a member of various government advisory groups on social enterprise, community assets, and the third sector. Steve is vice-Chair of the Coalition for Social Enterprise, Board member of the Adventure Capital Fund, and Board member of The Glass House community design service.
© Steve Wyler, Development Trusts Association August 2009 with Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Introduction
In the last few years community ownership of land and buildings has become, alongside social enterprise, a hot topic across the political spectrum, evidenced by manifesto promises, government reports and White Papers, enabling legislation, regulation and guidance, new investment funds, community right to buy legislation in Scotland, a review by the Welsh Assembly and an Asset Transfer Unit for England.
Despite continuing resistance from state municipalists and free-market fanatics alike, practice has kept pace with the promise. Within the expanding development trusts movement there now exists nearly £500m of assets in community ownership – empty and derelict buildings transformed into busy workspace, training rooms, conference centres, community run shops and restaurants, affordable housing, wasteland reclaimed for parks, community woodland, farms and allotments.
An idea whose time has come? If so, it has been a long time coming.
For hundreds of years the idea of community owned assets has run like a golden thread though our social history. Generation after generation, people have called for a different way of doing things, where land and buildings would belong neither to private landowners nor to the state, but would be held instead in trust and controlled by local communities, to provide amenities and create prosperity for the common good.
If we go back far enough, communities really did own their assets – indeed there was a time when community ownership of land in particular was not the exception, but rather the rule.
A history of community asset ownership 3 Free born Englishmen
Once land belonged to ‘free-born Englishmen’, but after 1066 the Norman invaders took the best of it for themselves. Even then, the peasants retained access to the unfenced commons, and remained in some respects a self governing community. In the wake of the Black Death, in which a third of the entire population of England perished, came the social upheavals that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, bringing with it new and radical ideas.
Before 1066 land in England was return for providing relief from hardship, owned not by wealthy landlords, nor and were paid in labour instead of by the state, nor even by the monarchy, food rent. But extensive common lands but rather by free peasant proprietors, remained, and all the people of a or ‘coerls’. Each family cultivated its own district or village shared the right to smallholding and undertook communal these lands. activities within their own village. The ceorl was an independent ‘free born Englishman’, subject only to the king, The Norman yoke to whom he had to provide military The Norman occupation changed all this. service when required, and the only tax After his victory William the Conqueror was an annual food rent, a quantity of handed out the land of England as spoils provision sufficient to maintain the king of war to his mercenaries, and as a and his retinue for a day. result, ownership of land was no longer absolute, but rested on permission This system was beginning to break of the king, the ultimate owner. Parts down even before the Norman conquest. of the kingdom were kept by William The Saxon kings rewarded supporters for himself ‘in demesne’, and the rest by making them ‘thegns’ or territorial was divided among about 180 barons, lords, and bestowed charters transferring on the understanding they would to the thegns the rights of claiming provide knights for battle when the need military service and food rent from the arose. In turn the barons retained peasants. In some places, when harvests a portion of the land allotted to them failed, thegns would take over land in as their own demesne and divided the
4 Development Trusts Association rest among knights, each of whom rural England. There were no hedges was under a military obligation to or fences; the cultivated land was the barons (and thus to the king). a single large open field, and every The churches and monasteries also year a communal gathering of villagers retained demesne lands and sub-let at the manor-court or court-leet would the rest of their holdings. allot to each man several narrow strips, taking care to share out the good and As for the conquered Saxons, they bad land equally, and on these narrow became serfs: survival in exchange strips each villager tried to grow enough for servitude. Where the population food to feed himself and his family. resisted they were annihilated, and their villages burnt, and for decades after The nobility were expected to provide 1066 great swathes of England especially basic assistance in cases where the in the North remained depopulated. poor became ill, or a man died and The nobility, naturally, kept the best land left a widow and children. Anyone who themselves. Villagers were required to did not work or who committed a give up a set number of days to work transgression was punished, or outlawed the lord’s demesne land, and to serve and left to starve to death in the woods as foot soldiers if there was war. There or wastelands. A rudimentary legal were many other rights and obligations, system did provide some limited varying from place to place, more safeguards for the common people, often preserved by custom than written and above all ‘habeas corpus’ ensured into formal statute. The village peasants that no man could be held in prison were obliged to grind their corn at the without being charged and put on trial lord’s mill, and if they wanted to marry, by a jury of his peers. But the lord they would first have to beg the lord’s held power in his manor, and was, permission, and pay a tribute. in practice, judge, jury and executioner. Moreover, there was also the church, But though in relation to the lord of which claimed its tithes from the poor, the manor they were serfs, in relation to made its own laws and held its own each other the peasants were in many courts, made certain that the common respects a self-governing community. people remained illiterate, controlled In most places, the landscape they public and private morality, and built worked was very unlike that of modern splendid cathedrals.
A history of community asset ownership 5 The commons economies. Only the monasteries grew Beyond the open field was unenclosed rich, and were hated for it. common land where the villagers had rights, granted not by statute but by immemorial custom, to cut the long The Black Death grass to make hay, to gather fuel from The Black Death changed everything. the woodland, or to graze their cattle It arrived in England in 1348, landing if they had any. There were also vast at Melcombe in Weymouth bay and forests, but these belonged to the spreading rapidly across the country. king and only the king and his nobility A third or more of the population were allowed to hunt the deer, wild perished, causing immense distress boar, rabbits, and other game. Poaching and social upheaval However, because was a national sport, but punishable of labour shortages, the working by death. people who survived found themselves everywhere in a stronger economic This system was, to a degree, position than before. A class of free sustainable. The villagers were allowed yeoman farmers emerged, who paid rent to gather wood for fuel, but only twigs on land and cattle, and in turn offered and branches they could reach with employment to farm labourers. There was a shepherd’s crook or a haymaker’s rapid transition towards a wage economy, hook, and therefore the woodlands were and bonds which for centuries had tied not destroyed and would continue, peasant workers to the villages in which winter after winter, providing fuel for the they were born were broken. Itinerant poor. It was nevertheless a subsistence workers and their families moved from economy. The villagers on their narrow village to village selling their labour, with strips, with rudimentary implements and neither the restraints nor protections of limited farming methods, could barely the feudal system. grow enough to feed themselves. There was little travel or trade between Wages were driven ever higher. communities, let alone nations. What Inevitably there were attempts to restore wealth the king and barons gathered control, and laws were passed to limit to themselves was more often the pillage wage levels. Suddenly the economy of war (the main purpose of the later was booming. There was expansion crusades) than the produce of local in sheep farming and wool production,
6 Development Trusts Association initially exported as a raw commodity The Peasants’ Revolt to the continent. Soon thousands of In 1381, thirty three years after the first small village enterprises were producing outbreak of the Black Death, the king the finest woollen cloth in Europe, decided to impose a new tax. He needed and the wool merchants became the cash to finance foreign adventures, greatest power in the land. Other forms and the rudimentary taxation system was of trade flourished, above all local no longer providing sufficient income markets, where travelling entrepreneurs to satisfy the lifestyle of the king and would sell household goods and the his court. For the first time, the central latest luxuries. These markets also offered government decided to impose a tax amusements, adding liveliness to directly on all citizens, and worse, this a society still living in the shadow of poll tax required everyone, rich or poor, death – the plague was to return to to pay the same amount. This injustice afflict each generation for another three added fuel to the fire in an already volatile hundred years. society. At the villages of Fobbing and Brentwood in Essex, villagers decided In this new world there was vastly not to pay, and forced tax collectors to more opportunity and wealth, but also flee. Resistance spread rapidly, and growing division between the wealthy the Peasants’ Revolt was underway. and the poor. Those left behind had no safety net. With large profits to be Radical clergymen and craftsmen made from wool, the old nobility and took the side of the common people. the rising merchant classes started to Pre-eminent among them was John Ball, replace arable farmland with pasture, a renegade priest, and when the rebels and worse, to encroach on common gathered at Blackheath on the outskirts of land, starting the long process of fencing London, John Ball addressed them: and hedging that was to destroy the subsistence economy, depopulate When Adam delved and Eve span, villages, and drive the poor off the land Who was then the gentleman? From the and into the towns. Often they did beginning all men by nature were created this without legal sanction, in outright alike, and our bondage or servitude came defiance of the laws. And yet it happened in by the unjust oppression of naughty all the same, and the poor seemed men. For if God would have had any powerless to prevent it. bondmen from the beginning, he would
A history of community asset ownership 7 have appointed who should be bond, to the people: ‘all the lands and and who free. And therefore I exhort you tenements now led by them [the bishops] to consider that now the time is come, should be confiscated, and divided appointed to us by God, in which ye may among the commons, only reserving for (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, them a reasonable sustenance.’ And and recover liberty. finally he called for an end to the feudal system of peasant bondage, insisting that In June 1381 the rebels marched into ‘there should be no more villeins in London, occupied the city, and struck England, and no serfdom or villeinage, off the heads of the Lord Chancellor, but that all men should be free and of the Lord Treasurer, and the Archbishop one condition.’1 of Canterbury. The rebels expected that the boy king Richard II would listen to Wat Tyler did not have to wait long to their grievances, and treat them with receive his answer. He was stabbed to justice. The king, accompanied by the death by the Lord Mayor’s retinue. The Mayor of London and a group of armed furious peasants drew back their retainers, rode out to meet the peasant bowstrings, but the boy king had the army which was camped at Smithfield presence of mind to save his life by a under the leadership of Wat Tyler. There promise that he would agree to all the are different versions of what happened demands. The mayor then rushed for next, but the Anonimalle Chronicle tells reinforcements, and the leaderless us something of the hopes of the rebellion, mollified by the king’s promises, peasants. Like John Ball, Wat Tyler called dispersed. When the immediate threat for all people to be treated by the State had passed, the king and the nobility as equal under the law, demanding turned to vengeance. Walsingham, in that ‘there should be no outlawry in any Historia Anglicana, records the king as process of law, and that no lord should announcing: ‘Serfs you were and serfs have lordship save civilly, and that there you are; you shall remain in bondage, not should be equality among all people such as you have hitherto been subject save only the king.’ to, but incomparably viler.’ This time, he kept his word. Wat Tyler went even further, attacking the abuses of the church and calling for church land and buildings to be returned
8 Development Trusts Association h rts irr or,18.E.I.f175 Board, © The British Library
Wat Tyler meets his death at Smithfield
A history of community asset ownership 9 Desolation and wilderness
Time and time again people rose in rebellion against the injustice of land enclosures. In 1513 a turner in a fool’s coat wandered through the City of London calling for shovels and spades, and Londoners threw down enclosures around the city. In 1516 Thomas More’s Utopia castigated the wealthy for the misery caused by enclosure of land, and renewed the demand for all property to be held in common. In 1549 the largest popular uprising of all took place in Norfolk where Robert Kett and 15,000 rebels assembled on Mousehold Common outside Norwich, and drew up a manifesto for justice and community ownership.
Shovels and spades honest persons arrested or indicted; After the failure of the Peasants’ Revolt, saying 'that no Londoner ought to go out the encroachment by merchants and of the city, but in the highways.' nobility upon commonly owned land continued, creating bands of landless This saying so grieved the Londoners, workers and widespread vagrancy, and that suddenly this year a great number generating discontent and further of the city assembled themselves in outbreaks of rebellion. Occasionally there a morning, and a turner in a fool's coat, were small and temporary victories, for came crying through the city, 'Shovels example in London in 1513, as Edward and spades! Shovels and spades!' Hall’s Chronicle records: So many of the people followed that it was a wonder to behold. And within ... the inhabitants of the towns about a short space, all the hedges about London, as Iseldon [Islington], Hoxton, the city were cast down, and the Shoreditch, and others, had so enclosed ditches filled up, and everything made the common fields with hedges and plain, such was the diligence of ditches, that neither the young men of these workmen.2 the city might shoot, nor the ancient persons walk for their pleasures in those The King demanded an explanation. The fields, but that either their bows and authorities complained of the ‘injury and arrows were taken away or broken, or the annoying’ done by the protesters to the
10 Development Trusts Association landowners, but King’s council after All their household stuff, which is very little some deliberation decided not to take worth, though it might well abide the sale, action, ‘after which time these fields yet being suddenly thrust out, they be were never hedged’. constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have, wandering about, soon spent that, what can they else do but Thomas More’s Utopia steal, and then justly, God wot, be hanged, The English humanism which flourished or else go about abegging? And yet then in the 1500s cast fresh eyes on also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, fundamental questions of human behaviour because they go about and work not; and social organisation, and among the whom no man will set a work, though they most prominent of this generation of never so willingly offer themselves thereto. philosophers and scientists was Thomas More. In 1516 he wrote his famous work, Thomas More claimed that the poor were Utopia, in which he denounced the more worthy to enjoy goods and property injustice of land enclosures: than the rich ‘because the rich men be covetous, crafty, and unprofitable: on the They enclose all in pastures; they throw other part, the poor be lowly, simple, and down houses; they pluck down towns; by their daily labour more profitable to the and leave nothing standing but only the common wealth than to themselves.’ church, to make of it a sheep-house. More believed that individual property And, as though you lost no small quantity ownership was a great cause of distress, of ground by forests; chases, lands and in Utopia would be abolished: and parks; these good holy men turn all dwelling places and all glebeland into Setting all upon a level was the only way desolation and wilderness. to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so long as there is property: for Therefore, that one covetous and when every man draws to himself all that insatiable cormorant and very plague he can compass, by one title or another, of his native country may compass it must needs follow, that how plentiful so about and enclose many thousand acres ever a nation may be, yet a few dividing of ground together within one pale or the wealth of it among themselves, the hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out rest must fall into indigence. of their own...
A history of community asset ownership 11 The society proposed in Utopia was ruled as a beacon for radical dissent for by a Prince and had many authoritarian three centuries. features. Order and discipline were more important than liberty, and for women especially this was no earthly paradise. Robert Kett and the But there was religious tolerance, and rebellion of the commons private possessions were not allowed. The greatest popular rebellion against Everyone (men and women) would work the illegal land enclosures took place in for only six hours a day, and everyone 1549, and started when villagers in would learn a particular skill: Wymondham in Norfolk held a festival to commemorate Thomas a Becket. Besides agriculture, which is so common The festival was itself an act of defiance, to them all, every man has some peculiar for as everyone knew, Becket was trade to which he applies himself, such as a saint and had been murdered by the the manufacture of wool, or flax, masonry, henchmen of a king. Indeed, the villagers smith's work, or carpenter's work. had good reason to be angry. The local landowners were fencing in open fields One feature of Utopia, which featured on which the villagers depended for their in many later community experiments, livelihood. Deprived of common land for was that everyone had the option to eat crops and grazing and fuel, and with no communally, but was not compelled means to seek justice in the courts, the to do so: peasants had grown desperate.
Though any that will may eat at home, On that summer’s day they marched yet none does it willingly, since it is both towards the estate of John Flowerdew, ridiculous and foolish for any to give a notorious landowner. Flowerdew was themselves the trouble to make ready clever and bribed the crowd not to tear an ill dinner at home, when there is a down his fences, but rather to tear down much more plentiful one made ready for the fences of a neighbour he disliked, him so near hand. Robert Kett. So the mob marched in that direction. Then something unexpected Thomas More later became Lord happened. When he heard their Chancellor, fell out with Henry VIII, and grievances, Kett listened and joined was executed, but Utopia remained them, even helping to tear down his own
12 Development Trusts Association fences. Indeed he became their leader. under such inconveniences, we should On 9 July 1549 Kett led the crowd to leave the Commonwealth unto our posterity, Norwich, at that time the second city of mourning and miserable, and much worse the kingdom. The gates were barred, than we received it of our fathers.’ so they set up camp below the city walls, on Mousehold Heath. In a few days, over They believed that if they gave way, 15,000 people had gathered. They tore oppression would gather pace: ‘Shall down enclosures around the city. The they, as they have brought hedges against Mayor of Norwich offered bribes and common pastures, inclose with their pardons for the crowd to disperse, but intolerable lusts also, all the commodities the people rejected all offers; they were and please of this life, which Nature the determined to settle for nothing less than parent of us all, would have common, justice itself, determined not to ‘endure and bringeth forth every day for us, as such great shame, as, living out our days well as for them?’ © Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery © Norwich Castle Museum and Art
Robert Kett and the Tree of Reformation
A history of community asset ownership 13 Under a spreading oak tree on Mousehold We pray that the poor mariners or Heath, which they named the Oak of Fisherman may have the whole profits of Reformation, Kett and his council of rebel their fishings as purpres grampes whales leaders met. From here they controlled or any great fish so it be not prejudicial to the great crowd, ensuring supplies your grace. of provisions and keeping order. On 24th July the insurgents attacked the walled We pray that it be not lawful to the lords city, armed with nothing more than of any manor to purchase land freely and pitchforks, sticks and mud. After a fierce to let them out again by copy of court roll struggle they entered the city and to their great advaunchement and to the took control. undoing of your poor subjects.
The rebels believed that if the king would We pray that every proprietary parson or learn of their grievances, he would provide vicar having a benefice of £10 or more by redress. After all, the tyrant Henry VIII was year shall either by themselves or by dead and his son, the boy Edward VI, was some other person teach poor men’s young and as yet uncorrupted. So under children of their parish the book called the Oak of Reformation the people drew the cathakysme and the primer. up their demands: The petition was sent down to London We pray your grace that no lord of no and the great crowd on Mousehold Heath manor shall common upon the Commons. waited for the answer. Eventually, the King and his Protectors offered promises We pray your grace to take all liberty and pardons to appease the rebels, of let into your own hands whereby all but at the same time they raised an men may quietly enjoy their commons army to hunt them down and destroy with all profits. them. The first attack by 14,000 soldiers was beaten off. A second attack, led We pray that all bond men may be by the infamous Earl of Warwick, was made free for god made all free with his a different matter. Three thousand rebels precious blood shedding. were slaughtered and thrown into a mass unmarked grave, the greatest ever We pray that Rivers may be free and massacre of English citizens by an common to all men for fishing and passage. English army. Robert Kett was captured
14 Development Trusts Association a few days later, tortured, convicted of A few years later John Clare, treason, and hung over the side of the peasant poet, wrote: Norfolk Castle, as an example. Other rebels were treated in similar fashion. Unbounded freedom ruled the The branches of the Oak of Reformation wandering scene; were hung with bodies. No fence of ownership crept in between To hide the prospect from the gazing eye; History is a tale told by the victorious. Its only bondage was the circling sky. Contemporary accounts are all but silent about this uprising against the theft of A mighty flat, undwarfed by common land. There was no monument to bush and tree, mark the rebellion, no gravestones to Spread its faint shadow of immensity, show where the dead lay buried. It was And lost itself, which seemed to as if it had never happened. eke its bounds In the blue mist the horizon’s The story of Kett was not revived until edge surrounds. two hundred and fifty years later, when as we shall see, Thomas Spence and Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours, Tom Paine were proclaiming that the theft Free as spring clods and wild of the commons from the people was as forest flowers, the root cause of poverty in the new Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free, industrial age. By the 1790s Mousehold And hath been once as it no Heath, the site of the rebellion, had itself more shall be. fallen victim to enclosures by wealthy Enclosure came, and trampled landowners, and by then enclosures were on the grave legalised by Acts of Parliament. In the Of labour’s rights, and left the poor a slave. 1800s paintings of Mousehold Heath appeared by John Crome and John Sell Fence meeting fence in owner’s Cotman. In these paintings the heath little bounds remains unenclosed. Paths, open to all, Of field and meadow, large as wander though a lovely wilderness, under garden-grounds, wide skies. Here is a celebration of the In little parcels little minds to please, world Kett’s rebels fought for, a freedom, With men and flocks imprisoned, once cherished, now forever lost. ill at ease.
A history of community asset ownership 15 Each little tyrant with his little sign Forgotten again for a century and Shows where man claims earth glows more, much of Mousehold Heath was no more divine; submerged within the expanding suburbs But paths to freedom and to of the city of Norwich. In the 1960s, childhood dear the municipal masters of Norwich cut A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’. down the Oak of Reformation, to make (The Moors, c 1824-25) way for a car park.
Mousehold Heath by John Sell Cotman, c1810 © Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery
16 Development Trusts Association Levellers and ranters and diggers
Despite the failure of Kett’s rebellion, More’s assertion that ‘setting all upon a level was the only way to make a nation happy’ was not easily suppressed. In 1607 across the Midlands great crowds gathered, led by the mysterious ‘Captain Pouch’, to throw down the hated fences. In the 1640’s Levellers such as Richard Overton called for enclosed lands to be returned to the poor, and Ranters such as Abiezer Coppe kissed beggars in the street and cried out that that the day was fast approaching when all things would be held in common. In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, to ‘work together, eat bread together’, in the belief that ‘the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all’.
Captain Pouch persons in Northamptonshire, Warwick The story of Captain Pouch is found and Leicestershire grew very strong, in the Annales of England, published being in some places of men, women in 1632: and children a thousand together, and at Hill Norton in Warwickshire there were About the middle of this month of May three thousand, and at Cottesbich here 1607, a great number of common assembled of men, women and children persons suddenly assembled themselves to the number of full five thousand.3 in Northamptonshire, and then others of a like nature assembled themselves in The protesters said that it had been Warwickshire, and some in Leicestershire, ‘credibly reported unto them by many they violently cut and break down that of late years there were three hedges, filled up ditches, and laid open hundred and fifty towns decayed and all such enclosures of commons or other depopulated, and that they supposed grounds as they found enclosed, which by this insurrection and casting down of ancient time had been open and of enclosures to cause reformation.’ employed to tillage, these tumultuous A gibbet was set up in the city of
A history of community asset ownership 17 Leicester as a warning not to get a battle at the village of Newton in involved. It was torn down by the people. Northamptonshire. The rebels were indicted with High Treason and several These riotous persons bent all their were executed, including Captain Pouch, strength to level and lay open enclosures who was ‘made exemplary.’ without exercising any manner of force or violence upon any man’s persons, goods At Newton, a contemporary account by or cattle, and wheresoever they came, the Earl of Shrewsbury reported that the they were generally relieved by the near protesters called themselves ‘levellers’. inhabitants, who sent them not only carts Others described themselves as ‘diggers’. laden with victual, but also good store of The diggers of Warwickshire issued a spades and shovels... proclamation to all other diggers:
The rebels appeared to be well Wee, as members of the whole, doe organised, but the leadership was at feele the smarte of these incroaching first a mystery: Tirants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty, and make At first these foresaid multitudes our loyall hearts to faint with breathing, assembled themselves without any so that they may dwell by themselves in particular head or guide, then started the midst of theyr heards of fatt weathers up a base fellow named John Reynoldes, [herds of fat wethers].4 whom they surnamed Captain Pouch because of a great leather pouch which he wore by his side. He said there The Levellers: was sufficient matter to defend them setting all things straight against all comers, but afterwards when These first levellers and diggers were he was apprehended his pouch was easily suppressed, but not for good, and searched, and therein was only a piece forty years later the terms re-emerged of green cheese. with increased vigour. In October 1647, in the celebrated Putney debates, Colonel The landowners, in particular the Thomas Rainsborough stood before the Treshams, raised an army and with the assembled Grandees of Parliament, and encouragement of the king suppressed declared, ‘For I really think that the the rebellion. Forty peasants were killed in poorest he that is in England hath a life to
18 Development Trusts Association live, as the greatest he.’ Rainsborough In the main Leveller manifesto, the principle was the spokesman at Putney for the demands were for an extension of Levellers, a political movement that voting rights to everyone over 21 (except derived support from soldiers in several that is for beggars, servants, Royalists, regiments of Cromwell’s New Model and women), annual Parliaments with Army, and radical tradesmen in the City of an elected representative for every London. The intention of the Levellers 400 people, the application of laws was to ‘set all things straight, and to raise equally to all people, and freedom of a party and community in the kingdom.’ religious conscience.
General Ireton for the Grandees replied They also proposed that all taxes should be to Rainsborough. Only those with a abolished, saving only a tax on land: ‘an ‘permanent fixed interest [ie owning land] equal rate in the pound on every reall and in this kingdom,’ he argued, should have personall estate in the Nation.’7 However, in a part in disposing of the kingdom’s their manifesto, the Levellers were careful affairs. But the Levellers were determined to dissociate themselves from more radical that the English revolution should not demands which they claimed would ‘level overthrow a tyranny of kings only to see men’s Estates, destroy Property, or make all it replaced by a tyranny of landed gentry. things Common.’ This was a reference to A year earlier Richard Overton had the programme of the ‘True Levellers’, pleaded, ‘let not the greatest peers in the known also as the ‘Diggers’. land be more respected with you than so many old bellows-winders, broom- men, cobblers, tinkers, or chimney- Abiezer Coppe the ranter sweepers, who are all equally freeborn.’5 The Ranters, as their enemies called Overton called for enclosed lands to be them, also flourished during the English returned to the people: Civil War. They were social revolutionaries and mystics, convinced that the only That all grounds which anciently lay in divinity was to be found within the Common for the poor, and are now individual human being. They also believed impropriate, inclosed and fenced in, may that those in possession of such divinity forthwith (in whose hands soever they are) were free spirits for whom absolutely be cast out, and laid open again to the free nothing, however unconventional or and common use and benefit of the poor.6 shocking, could be sinful.
A history of community asset ownership 19 The most celebrated of all the Ranters and carnall reason; shall be confounded was a renegade Anabaptist preacher and plagued into community and named Abiezer Coppe (1619-1672). He universality. And ther’s a most glorious identified himself with the most destitute, design in it: and equality, community, and the most wretched, the most oppressed: universall love; shall be in request to the utter confounding of abominable pride, Mine eares are filled brim full with cryes murther, hypocrisie, tyranny and of poore prisoners, Newgate, Ludgate oppression, &c.9 cryes (of late) are seldome out on mine eares. Those dolefull cryes, Bread, bread, Coppe rejected both ‘sword-levelling’ bread for the Lords sake, pierce mine and ‘digging-levelling’ in favour of an eares, and heart, I can no longer forbeare.8 ecstatic spiritual rebirth which would be achieved by direct and intense social Coppe advocated an extreme form of interaction with the common people. levelling, where all property would be So he made a point of swearing, kissing relinquished by the individual, and beggars in the streets, consorting with everything would be held in common. gypsies, living promiscuously, and confounding ‘plaguy holiness and Give, give, give, give up, give up your righteousness’ by ‘skipping, leaping, houses, horses, goods, gold, Lands, give dancing, like one of the fools.’ For Coppe up, account nothing your own, have ALL the man of sin was a ‘brisk, spruce, THINGS common, or els the plague of neat, self-seeking, fine finiking fellow.’ God will rot and consume all that you have. Coppe rejected the pomp and ritual He believed that the new millennium of all organised religion in favour of a was imminent, in which property rights life based on the most simple and direct would be abolished, social equality communitarian principles: ‘The true would flourish, and the divinity inherent in breaking of bread – is from house to mankind would find full expression: house, &c. Neighbours [in singleness of heart] saying if I have any bread, &c. It’s but yet a little while, and the strongest, it’s thine, I will not call it mine own, it’s yea, the seemingly purest propriety common. These are true Communicants, [property], which may mostly plead and this is the true breaking of bread priviledge and Prerogative from Scripture, among men.’10
20 Development Trusts Association This was dangerous stuff, condemned The earth (which was made to be a on all sides. Coppe was imprisoned Common Treasury of relief for all, both and twice forced to publish recantations Beasts and Men) was hedged in to (although contemporary accounts In-closures by the teachers and rulers, doubted their sincerity). He died in 1672, and the others were made Servants and of illnesses produced by ‘drinking and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this whoring’, as his enemies reported. Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Gerrard Winstanley Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he and the Diggers were a respector of persons, delighting in On April Fool’s day in 1649 half a dozen the comfortable Livelihoods of some, and men began to dig common land at rejoycing in the miserable povertie and St George’s Hill, Weybridge, in Surrey. straits of others. From the beginning it Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, was was not so.11 a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman, who claimed he had received The plan at St George’s Hill was to a divine injunction that people should ‘lay the Foundation of making the Earth ‘work together; eat bread together’. a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor... Not Inclosing any part into The numbers tripled within a week. any particular hand, but all as one man, They called themselves True Levellers working together, and feeding together and soon became known simply as the as Sons of one Father, members of one Diggers. They were arrested and locked Family; not one Lording over another, in a church, released and locked up again. but all looking upon each other, as equals An angry neighbour said, ‘They invite all in the Creation.’ St George’s Hill was to to come and help them, and promise be only the beginning: Winstanley them meat, drink and clothes. They do envisaged a vast series of collective threaten to pull down and level all park communities: ‘not only this Common, pales, and lay open, and intend to plant or Heath should be taken in and Manured there very shortly... It is feared they have by the People, but all the Commons some design in hand.’ They certainly did, and waste Ground in England, and in and within weeks Winstanley published a the whole World, shall be taken in by pamphlet to explain his ‘design’: the People.’
A history of community asset ownership 21 Once in possession of their birthright, the Bailiffs confiscated the cows, but people will never let it go: ‘wheresoever wellwishers recovered them. Winstanley there is a People, thus united by Common then moved the community to Cobham Community of livelihood into Oneness, Manor, built four houses and prepared it will become the strongest Land in the the land for a crop of winter grain. World, for then they will be as one man to But troops were sent in October and defend their Inheritance.’ War and division November and on the second occasion would cease: ‘Propriety [property] and they pulled down the houses. The single Interest, divides the People of a Diggers built themselves ‘some few little land, and the whole world into Parties, hutches like calf-cribs’, and slept there and is the cause of all Wars and Bloud- at night, continuing to plant wheat and shed, and Contention every where.’ rye, ‘counting it a great happiness to be persecuted for righteousnesse sake, Winstanley and his follower William by the Priests and Professors.’ Everard were summoned to Whitehall to be questioned by Lord Fairfax, the army They denied slanders that they were chief. They stood before Fairfax with their thieves or that they held women in hats on, and when asked why they did common: ‘I own this to be a truth, That this, they replied, ‘Because he was but the earth ought to be a common Treasury their fellow creature.’ They proclaimed, to all; but as for women, Let every man ‘what they did was to restore the ancient have his own wife, and every woman her community of enjoying the fruits of the own husband,’ said Winstanley. They earth, and to distribute the benefits survived the winter and by April 1650 had thereof to the poor and needy, and to sown eleven acres of corn and had built feed the hungry and to clothe the naked.’ seven houses. The vicar of Horsley sent a group of men to demolish one of the Back on St George’s Hill, when the houses, ill-treating the occupier’s pregnant Diggers tried to cut and sell wood on wife, who suffered a miscarriage. the common land, their horses were attacked by local landowners. Then Winstanley tried to negotiate a settlement, ‘divers men in women’s apparele on foot, promising that the Diggers would not cut with every one a staffe or club’ attacked wood on the common if the neighbours the Diggers. When this failed to dislodge would not pull down their houses. But on them, the landlords took to the courts. Easter Friday they were attacked by fifty
22 Development Trusts Association men, who burnt down the houses and Dunstable in Bedfordshire, Bosworth in scattered their belongings across the Leicestershire, and at other sites in common. In frustration Winstanley wrote Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire. that if the Diggers beg ‘they whip them by their Law for vagrants, if they In 1649 Winstanley claimed that steal they hang them; and if they set ‘Reason requires that every man should themselves to plant the Common for live upon the increase of the earth a livelihood, that they may neither beg comfortably,’ asserting that half or two nor steale, and whereby England is thirds of the land of England was not inriched, yet they will not suffer them properly cultivated: ‘If the waste land of to do this neither.’ The settlement was England were manured by her children, destroyed but Winstanley remained it would become in a few years the defiant. ‘And now they cry out the Diggers richest, the strongest and [most] are routed, and they rang bells for joy; flourishing land in the world.’12 This went but stay Gentlemen, your selves are beyond an attempt to defend traditional routed, and you have lost your Crown, commoner rights against those who and the poor Diggers have won the argued, perhaps correctly, that more Crown of glory.’ intensive farming methods were needed to supply the needs of the growing Meantime at Wellingborough in population. Winstanley argued that Northampton, where over a thousand collective cultivation of the land by the inhabitants were receiving alms and poor, as an alternative to expropriation public relief, nine men led by Richard by the rich, could generate both Smith began ‘to bestow their righteous prosperity and social justice. labour upon the common land at Bareshanke.’ They resolved not to His plan for social reformation was dig up any man’s property ‘until they set out in 1652 in his greatest work: freely give it us’ and they were pleased The Law of Freedom in a Platform.13 to discover that ‘there were not wanting Here he states his quest: ‘The great those that did.’ Other Digger colonies searching of heart in these days is to find were established at Wellingborough out where true freedom lies, that the in Northamptonshire, Cox Hall in Kent, commonwealth of England might be Iver in Buckinghamshire, Barnet in established in peace.’ The solution lies Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, in the restoration of common land to the
A history of community asset ownership 23 h rts irr or,1027i16 (3) Board, © The British Library
24 Development Trusts Association community as a whole: ‘True freedom Elected councils would govern at local lies in the free enjoyment of the earth.’ levels, and these would send elected Winstanley proposed that all land representatives to national government. confiscated from royalists and from As in Thomas More’s Utopia, there would the dissolution of the monasteries a be no lawyers. Education would be century earlier should be added to a universal and enable men and women to commonwealth land fund. Private discover the ‘secrets of Nature and ownership of land or the produce of Creation within which all true knowledge the land would be abolished (although is wrapped up.’ No one would work families would retain ownership of their beyond the age of forty. houses and property within it), money would disappear, and communal Winstanley recognized that it was storehouses would be set up: no easy thing for people to live together harmoniously in a community. He Every tradesman shall fetch materials, accepted that in any parish ‘the body as leather, wool, flax, corn and the like, of the people are confused and from the public store-houses, to work disordered, because some are wise, upon without buying and selling; and some foolish, some subtle and cunning when particular works are made, as cloth, to deceive, others plain-hearted, some shoes, hats and the like, the tradesmen strong, some weak, some rash, angry, shall bring these particular works to some mild and quiet-spirited.’ Therefore particular shops, as it is now in practice, ‘peacemakers’ would be annually elected without buying and selling. And every in every parish ‘to prevent troubles and family as they want such things as they to preserve common peace.’ cannot make, they shall go to these shops and fetch without money. Similarly, elected ‘overseers’ would maintain order and ensure effective Commerce, he believed, would thrive production and exchange: ‘they are to under such arrangements: see that particular tradesmen, as weavers of linen and woollen cloth, spinners, Every man shall be brought up in trades smiths, hatters, glovers and such like, do and labours, and all trades shall be bring in their works into the shops maintained with more improvement, to the appointed; and they are to see that the enriching of the commonwealth. shops and storehouses within their
A history of community asset ownership 25 several circuits be kept still furnished: like, whereby the commonwealth may [and] that when families of other trades more flourish in peace and plenty, for want such commodities as they cannot which virtues those persons received make, they may go to the shops and honour in the places where they dwelt: storehouses where such commodities are, and receive them for their use without When other parts of the land hear of it, buying or selling.’ many thereby will be encouraged to employ their reason and industry to do The third type of elected officer in every the like, that so in time there will not be parish would be the ‘postmasters’. These any secret in nature which now lies hid would keep monthly records of events (by reason of the iron age of kingly and transactions within the parish, and oppressing government) but by some or share these records with other parishes other will be brought to light, to the and with the nation as a whole. This beauty of our commonwealth. would allow all communities to assist each other in the case of disaster, avoid Winstanley’s proposals were dismissed, mistakes that others had made, and and the Diggers were rapidly and share discoveries and innovations: ruthlessly suppressed by the aspiring landowners within Cromwell’s The benefit lies here, that if any part of Protectorate. The restoration of Charles II the land be visited with plague, famine, was followed by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ invasion or insurrection, or any casualties, of 1688 in which, though the monarchy’s the other parts of the land may have powers were limited, the landowning speedy knowledge, and send relief. classes took political and economic control. Exactly what the Levellers and And if any accident fall out through Diggers had most feared had come to unreasonable action or careless neglect, pass, and the ‘common treasury’ was other parts of the land may thereby be once again denied to the people. made watchful to prevent like danger.
Or if any through industry or ripeness of understanding have found out any secret in nature, or new invention in any art or trade or in the tillage of the earth, or such
26 Development Trusts Association The people’s farm
In 1775 the schoolmaster Thomas Spence gave a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society which set out a vision of a new millennium, where poverty would be at an end and social justice would reign, founded on community ownership of land and community self-government. Spence’s ideas contributed to the ferment of radicalism that flourished in the years following the French Revolution. In 1791 appeared Tom Paine’s Rights of Man followed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men, and a few years later by Paine’s Agrarian Justice. William Blake’s poem ‘London’ expressed the social desolation of a ‘charter’d’ urban landscape.
Thomas Spence and every adult (women as well as men) In 1775 Thomas Spence, an impoverished with residence of a year would enjoy full schoolmaster, delivered and published citizenship rights. a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society. ‘The Real Rights of Man’, was the Money raised locally by land taxation title of his lecture, and Spence’s thesis could provide for relief of the poor, was that poverty and injustice in an age universal education, roads, canals, of rapidly increasing material prosperity hospitals, schools, ‘planting and taking were the direct consequence of theft from in waste ground’, and training local the people of land, their common citizens in the use of arms. A small inheritance. Spence’s ‘Plan’ would restore proportion of the tax would be sent to this inheritance. national government (representatives would be elected annually by every A day would be appointed on which all parish). Government would not interfere land would be reclaimed by the people, in local laws and decisions, except and pass into ownership and control of where these threatened the ‘rights and parish corporations. Land would then be liberties of mankind’. leased out to the highest bidders, and rental income would replace all other There would be sufficient income for taxation. Every parish would be self- all the needs of society, because there governing, and would set its own laws, would be no need for an expensive
A history of community asset ownership 27 centralised officialdom: in Spence’s He believed in minimal government, scheme ‘the government, which may be and that people should be allowed to said to be the greatest mouth, having live freely, provided only that they do neither excisemen, custom-house men, not restrict the rights of other people: collectors, army, pensioners, bribery, ‘liberty is that power which belongs to nor such like ruination vermin to maintain, a man which does not hurt the rights is soon satisfied.’ If someone were to of another.’14 arrive in need from a foreign land, they should be provided with relief by the Spence was not hostile to personal parish, but the cost should be defrayed wealth. He told the wealthy that they from the parish contribution to the would be allowed to keep ‘all your national exchequer. Thus, refugees would moveable riches and wealth, all your gold be helped, but not looked upon with ‘an and silver, your rich clothes and furniture, envious eye.’ Any funds left over would your corn and cattle, and everything be distributed as equal dividends to all that does not appertain to the land as members of the population, the elderly a fixture’.15 He believed that commerce and infants included. Free trade and would thrive under his system: ‘the manufacture, a flourishing agriculture, uncommon freedom, and security of and localised democracy would combine property in such a happy state would to raise the nation to a high moral level, operate as a stimulus rather than a people’s Jubilee. a check to industry.’ A multitude of small tradesmen would replace monopolising Spence spoke out for the emancipation corporations, for ‘great, avaricious of women as well as men: he declared monopolising companies... for their that women not only knew their rights private ends, disturb the peace of the ‘but have spirit to assert them.’ He even whole world, setting nation against nation, proposed that in every parish a committee and people against people.’16 of women (rather than their ‘gallant lock-jawed spouses and paramours’) In 1792 Spence travelled to London and would manage the business of collecting set up a street stall on Chancery Lane. rental income and commissioning public He sold a rum punch, distributed radical works. The ‘end of society is common propaganda. He also produced trade happiness’, declared the first article of tokens, with slogans and images to Spence’s proposed Constitution. spread his messages. On one, a bonfire
28 Development Trusts Association of land deeds signals the end of oppression. Sometimes Spence would sell his tokens, sometimes he would scatter them into the London crowd.
Frequently imprisoned, Thomas Spence never gave up, and attracted a group of dedicated followers – small groups of working men, including the Black radical Robert Wedderburn, the son of a Jamaican slave. The Spenceans met in pubs, chalked slogans on the walls: ‘Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies’, ‘The Land is the People’s Farm’. In 1801 they inspired bread riots.
Spence died in 1814 and was buried by forty followers, and a Society of Spencean Philanthropists led by Wedderburn was formed. Wedderburn opened a Unitarian chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho and government spies reported that he was making ‘violent, seditious, and bitterly anti-Christian Spencean speeches’. In 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote ‘The earth cannot be justly the private property of individuals, because it was never manufactured by man; therefore whoever sold it, sold that which was not his own.’17 By 1819 up to 200 people were paying 6d. a head to attend debates, and ‘lectures every Sabbath day on Theology, Morality, A Spence token: a bonfire of land Natural Philosophy and Politics deeds signals the ‘end of oppression’
A history of community asset ownership 29 by a self-taught West Indian’. Frustrated Mary Wollstonecraft in their attempts to promote Spence’s and Thomas Paine Plan through rational argument, the Spence’s ideas found echoes among Society turned to armed insurrection. other radical writers of his generation. In 1820 after the fiasco of the Cato In 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft published Street conspiracy (a bungled attempt to A Vindication of the Rights of Men assassinate members of the government), where she sketched a vision of society its leaders were executed or transported. without extremes of wealth and poverty, where property is divided more equitably, Wedderburn himself opposed the and independent smallholders form conspiracy, but only because he thought the basis of the economy. She suggested it was premature. Eventually he was that the ‘industrious’ peasant should charged with blasphemous libel. In court be permitted to take over and cultivate he asked the jury: ‘Where, after all, is my unused land: crime? It consists merely in having spoken in the same plain and homely Why does the brown waste meet the language which Christ and his disciples traveller’s view, when men want work? uniformly used. There seems to be a But commons cannot be enclosed conspiracy against the poor, to keep them without acts of parliament to increase in ignorance and superstition’. Found the property of the rich! Why might not guilty he was sentenced to two years in the industrious peasant be allowed to Dorchester Prison. On his release steal a farm from the heath? Wedderburn continued to campaign for press freedom, against injustice, and for In 1791 and 1792 appeared Thomas the ideas of Thomas Spence. In 1824 he Paine’s The Rights of Man, in two parts. published The Horrors of Slavery. In He pointed out that society can operate 1831, at the age of 68, he was arrested perfectly well without a centralised once more and sent to Giltspur Street government of the few over the many: Prison; four years later he died. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
30 Development Trusts Association How often is the natural propensity to persons aged fifty or above would receive society disturbed or destroyed by the an annuity of £10 ‘to enable them to live in operations of government! When the Old Age without Wretchedness, and go latter, instead of being ingrafted on the decently out of the world.’ principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour However, Paine’s proposals did not allow and oppression, it becomes the cause of for local community ownership or control. the mischiefs it ought to prevent. The state, through the national fund, would provide for all. Thomas Spence saw the The Rights of Man was a bestseller, bought danger in this: in 1797 he accused Paine in installments in cheap editions by working of promoting ‘the sneaking unmanly spirit class radicals through ‘corresponding of conscious dependence’: societies’. Soon both The Rights of Man and the corresponding societies were Under the system of Agrarian Justice, outlawed, and Paine was charged with the people will, as it were, sell their seditious libel. Paine escaped and fled birthright for a mess of porridge, by to France where he became a member accepting of a paltry consideration in of the Convention, but, falling into lieu of their rights... disfavour with the increasingly despotic revolutionaries, Paine was imprisoned and The people will become supine and only narrowly escaped the guillotine. He careless in respect of public affairs, made his way to the United States and, in knowing the utmost they can receive of 1797, wrote the most famous pamphlet of the public money.18 land reform: Agrarian Justice. Above all Spence rejected Paine’s Paine’s proposals were that all landowners confidence in a centralised state: ‘instead should pay ‘to the community a ground- of debating about mending the State’ rent’ to be accumulated in a national fund. it would be better, claimed Spence, From this fund every person reaching the to ‘employ our ingenuity nearer home’: age of twenty one would receive a bounty of ‘Fifteen Pounds Sterling to enable him, The results of our debates [would or her, to begin in the World.’ He also appear] in every parish: how we shall work called for a universal old age pension: all such a mine, make such a river navigable,
A history of community asset ownership 31 or improve such a waste. These things And mark in every face I meet we are all immediately interested in and Marks of weakness, marks of woe. have each a vote in executing; and thus we are not mere spectators in the world, The first draft of this poem has survived but as men ought to be, actors.19 in Blake’s notebook, and from this we know that originally Blake used the This was the beginning of a debate which phrase ‘dirty street’. The substitution was to run through the chartist, socialist ‘charter’d’ changes everything. The and co-operative movements. Would social historian E.P Thompson remarks that reform be best accomplished through a ‘the word is standing at an intellectual national Parliament and a centralised state, and political cross-roads’, producing or by means of largely autonomous local not a single meaning but a series of communities? Should all people play an associations.21 For contemporary active and determining role, as actors readers the word ‘charter’d’ might have rather than spectators,or should authority invoked the mighty chartered companies and resources be controlled through a such as the East India Company, whose highly educated and professionalised ships set out from the Thames, and elite? The debate remains as relevant and whose operations were at the time under unresolved today as it was in the 1790s. attack in the radical press. The word also alluded to the Whig concept of freedom (chartered liberty, the Magna William Blake’s Carta), but for Blake this was no true ‘Charter’d’ London freedom claimed as of right, but rather In the poem ‘London’, which William Blake a debased freedom handed out by the printed by hand in 1794 as one of his powerful.As Paine had written in The Songs of Experience,20 the causes Rights of Man: of poverty and the nature of the modern Babylon are identified: the theft of It is a perversion of terms to say that common land from the people, and the a charter gives rights. It operates consequent debasement of social value by a contrary effect—that of taking by means of squalid commercialism: rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, I wander thro’ each charter’d street, by annulling those rights in the majority, Near where the charter’d Thames leave the right, by exclusion, in the does flow hands of a few...
32 Development Trusts Association © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library 33 A history of asset ownership community Above all the word ‘charter’d’ invokes the Thompson points out that ‘Blake's legalised theft of land from the people, by "London" is not seen from without as charter and Act of Parliament. In Blake’s spectacle. It is seen, or suffered, from lifetime the enclosure of common land was within, by a Londoner.’ This is a poem continuing at an unprecedented pace: whose ‘moral realism is so searching that during the eighteenth and nineteenth it is raised to the intensity of apocalyptic centuries more than seven million acres of vision.’ As the poem progresses the land were enclosed by a series of 4,200 narrator takes the reader with him ever private Acts and various general enclosure deeper into the sights and sounds of the Acts.22 The land (the ‘charter’d streets’) desolate city. Commercial transactions and even the rivers (the ‘charter’d Thames’) and the institutions of the powerful was once the birthright of the people, but destroy the human spirit, ultimately had been expropriated by the rich and corrupting all that is created (‘the new- powerful. Blake explicitly linked the theft of born infant’s tear’) and blighting all human land by charter to the distress of modern attempts at unification (‘the Marriage civilization, and the poem continues: hearse’).Later, Blake was to express the antithesis of this desolate vision as the In every cry of every Man, reawakening and re-unification of ‘Albion’, In every Infants cry of fear, the embodiment of England and of all In every voice: in every ban, mankind, and in his epic poem Jerusalem The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. appears one of the finest articulations of How the Chimney-sweeper's cry the early co-operative or ‘socialist’ spirit: Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh In my Exchanges every Land Runs in blood down Palace walls. Shall walk, & mine in every Land, Mutual shall build Jerusalem: But most thro midnight streets I hear Both heart in heart & hand in hand.23 How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
34 Development Trusts Association Villages of co-operation
In the early 1800s Robert Owen introduced reforms at New Lanark in Scotland and went on to establish a co-operative community at New Harmony in the United States. Owen’s vision was of a society made up of a commonwealth of self-governing and self-sufficient ‘villages of co-operation’, each of around 1,000 people, where sectarian religious views would not be allowed to take hold, and industry and enterprise for the common good would provide prosperity for all. New Harmony was short lived but it stirred the imagination: many experiments followed and some such as Ralahine in Ireland held high promise. The first co-operative store was founded in Brighton by Dr William King in 1827, not as an end in itself but rather as a means to finance these ‘socialist’ communities.
In the early 1800’s Robert Owen, a part- dancing, exercises, music and singing, owner of cotton mills at New Lanark near and in summer excursions were made Glasgow, became shocked at the into the countryside. conditions of the workforce and their families and resolved to do something The scheme attracted interest, and at about it. He believed that education was first Owen expected that his example the solution, and opened a school at New would be enthusiastically taken up by Lanark which he described as an others within the ruling classes. This was ‘Institution for the Formation of Character.’ not to be. However, a new opportunity At the school’s opening ceremony he came in 1817: alarmed by mass declared that ‘no obstacle whatsoever unemployment in the aftermath of the intervenes at this moment’ to create a Napoleonic wars, and a rise in social healthy society free of crime and poverty, unrest, the government was desperate ‘except ignorance’.24 Working class for solutions. Owen was invited by the children (both girls and boys) were taught Archbishop of Canterbury and during the day and older children and subsequently by a Parliamentary adults in the evening; lessons included Committee on the Administration of the
A history of community asset ownership 35 Poor Laws to set out his ideas. In 1819 Ricardo and Sir Robert Peel, he also the Committee published a diagram of encountered vehement opposition from Owen’s proposals inscribed ‘A view and others including Wilberforce and the plan of the Agricultural Villages of Unity Chancellor of the Exchequer. An attempt and Mutual Co-operation’. to establish a select committee to get the plan underway was heavily defeated by Owen proposed that society should be 141 votes to 17. transformed into a series of communities, with an ideal population of 800-1,200. Each was to be self-supporting and their New Harmony members would be engaged in various In November 1824 Owen turned his branches of manufacture and agriculture. sights towards America. With $135,000 of There should be enough land to supply his own money he purchased an existing the needs of the village, and to produce colony in Indiana capable of housing 800 a surplus allowing trade with other people. New Harmony, as the colony was communities. The villages would be renamed, would become the model for a located in the centre of farmland, and the ‘New Moral World’. Here, Owen adopted layout would encourage a communal way the ideas of Josiah Warren, an American of life. A parallelogram was proposed, anarchist who lived for a while at New avoiding traditional streets and alleys that Harmony and other Owenite communities, Owen believed were damaging to health and who had set up the first time store. and a source of crime. Labour was to be the new currency, and New Harmony produced its own Owen’s belief in the force of rational banknotes representing hours of labour. persuasion made him confident that capital to create the first communities Owen was determined that New would come from industrialists, Harmony should exert an educative force landowners, parishes and counties, and not just on its own inhabitants but on groups of farmers, mechanics and society at large. The key was to attract tradesmen. However, the immediate scientists of the highest calibre and in reaction of the establishment was this Owen was remarkably successful. disappointing. While Owen indeed found In 1826 William Maclure, a wealthy several influential supporters including Scottish geologist and educationalist, the Duke of Kent, the economist David sent out his private library, philosophical
36 Development Trusts Association instruments, and collections of natural begun but soon abandoned; a colony history. These were accompanied by a at Graveley near Brighton had more party of scientific associates, including success. At Manea Fen near Cambridge, the geologist Gerhard Troost and the a settlement which Owen discouraged, naturalists Charles Lesueur and Thomas a windmill was erected named Tidd Pratt, Say. They travelled together to New in honour of the Registrar of Friendly Harmony by keel-boat from Pittsburgh - Societies (the windmill was completed on a ‘boat-load of knowledge’. the day the community received its certificate of incorporation). Maclure’s aim was to make New Harmony the ‘centre of education in the west’. The most promising of the early Owenite His enthusiasm had a deep impact on experiments was at Ralahine in County Owen’s sons, and one of them, David Clare. In 1831, in an attempt to prevent Dale Owen, became a prominent secret societies from recruiting his geologist. The young Abraham Lincoln discontented tenants, an Irish landowner saw the colonists pass up the river on John Vandeleur persuaded an Owenite their way to New Harmony and socialist Thomas Craig to establish a unsuccessfully begged his father to let co-operative society on his estate of 618 him join them. acres at Ralahine in County Clare. When Craig arrived he learned that the previous manager had been shot dead by the Early co-operative tenants, and Craig was greeted by an communities anonymous note in which was depicted a Owen’s ideas and activities in the skull and crossbones, together with a United States stimulated a series of warning that he too would soon be put to further experiments. Some were bed under the ‘daisy quilt’. ill-conceived and quickly vanished, but all contributed to a growing pool of skills Nevertheless, it was not long before and knowledge. In Spa Fields in London the tenants were won over by Craig’s in the 1820s Owen’s followers took steps proposals. The community established to research and measure social impacts; by Craig consisted of forty-six people at Orbiston in Scotland a substantial and was self-governing: a managing community was established; early committee of nine was elected twice a attempts at co-operation in Devon were year. The aims of the New System,
A history of community asset ownership 37 Ralahine, County Clare
as it became known at Ralahine, were of a gentleman’s visiting card. Fractions to acquire common wealth to protect of these down to sixteenths were members against the evils of old age recognized and so were multiples, and and sickness, to achieve mental and they could be spent in the co-operative moral improvement of adults, and to store which provided healthy and educate children. Alcohol, tobacco and unadulterated food, thus ensuring that snuff were banned, as was gambling wealth as far as possible remained in of any kind. The members of the circulation within the community. If the community had to work twelve hours a members wished to spend money outside day in summer and from dawn to dusk the commune they could exchange the in winter, with a one hour break for labour notes for coin. All members of the dinner. They ate meals together, and a community over the age of seventeen school was established. took a share in the division of profits. The estate prospered and a further twenty Instead of money the workers were paid nine people joined. New machinery was in cardboard vouchers representing a bought and the first mowing machine in day’s work, worth 8d and about the size Ireland was introduced.
38 Development Trusts Association After two years, however, the experiment Co-operative Community’ which was collapsed, but through no fault of the moored on the Thames, where it was community itself. The landowner Vandeleur thought the inhabitants would be safe from lost all his possessions through gambling, the extortions of retail traders, lodging- and because he had retained ownership house keepers, and gin shops. In the same of the estate (the community paid an year it was reported that community coffee- annual rent) the land was seized and the houses existed in London. community was evicted. The members met for the last time on 23 November Owen himself suggested that the 1833 and placed on record a declaration government should purchase the new of ‘the contentment, peace and railways and the land by the side of them happiness they had experienced up to six miles broad so that communities for two years under the arrangements could be established as the railways introduced by Mr. Vandeleur and developed, thus capturing increased land Mr. Craig and which through no fault of value for public benefit. The suggestion the Association was now at an end.’ was, unfortunately, not acted upon.
Ralahine remained a beacon of hope. In New Harmony, Owen had proposed Seventy years later Alfred Russell Wallace a new role for women. With child-rearing, praised its practice of self-government: cooking and washing transferred to the ‘it was found that the most ignorant of community, women could play a role in labourers were sometimes able to make factories and gardens, and take an suggestions of value to the community... equal share in communal tasks. Owen it shows that sufficient business capacity also took a reformist position on marriage, does exist among very humble men as attacking impediments to divorce, and soon as they have the opportunity of for this he was much condemned by practising it.’25 the establishment. Owen was not the first to combine the political and social emancipation of women with proposals A new moral world for a society based on small communities The movement was seething with ideas, – Mary Wollstonecraft in 179026 and not all of them practical. In 1834 a letter Thomas Spence in 179727 had sketched was published in Owen’s magazine the out just such a vision. But it was Owen New Moral World proposing a ‘Floating and his followers who were to develop
A history of community asset ownership 39 these ideas further and indeed attempt of the co-operative stores movement.31 to put them into practice. The atheist Just three years later it was reported Emma Martin believed that only Owenite that already 300 were operating across socialism could remove the great evil the country. A co-operative journal of the ‘depraved and ignorant condition Common Sense described the purpose of women’,28 and William Thompson saw of a trading association: in co-operative communities the means to achieve perfect equality between men The object of a Trading Association and women: is briefly this: to furnish most of the articles of food in ordinary consumption This scheme of social happiness is the to its members, and to accumulate a only one which will completely and for fund for the purpose of renting land for ever ensure the perfect equality and cultivation, and the formation thereon entire reciprocity of happiness between of a co-operative community.32 women and men.29 But often the stores became an end in In practice, Owenite communities fell themselves, and the original impulse, to short of perfection; while women usually provide finance for new Owenite had voting rights within the communities, communities, was lost, and many of the and benefited from education on an equal stores failed. basis, the communities remained largely male-dominated, and the apportionment In 1844 new life was imparted into this of labour often resulted in women working movement by a group of 28 weavers longer hours.30 and other working people who set up ‘The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers’ opening a small grocery store Co-operative trading in Toad Lane, selling only unadulterated The Owenite experiments gave birth goods. They invented a new form of to a movement of co-operative stores. business, whereby the customer became In 1827 Dr William King became a partner in the rewards of mutual convinced that a co-operative shop endeavour: they refused to give credit could provide the money to finance a to customers, but for the first time paid community, and set one up in Brighton them a share of profits (a ‘dividend’). for this purpose. This was the beginning The Rules of the Society became a
40 Development Trusts Association model for others, and within a decade their humble subscriptions of twopence there were nearly 1,000 co-operative a week, James Smithies was its stores operating on similar principles earliest secretary and counsellor... across the country. In the presence of his vivacity no one could despond, confronted by his As with the first co-operative stores the buoyant humour no one could be angry. aim was to create fully self-supporting He laughed the store out of despair communities, on land which they into prosperity. themselves would own: His ‘laugh was like a festival,’ and he As a further benefit and security to the kept the movement ‘merry in its members of this society. the society shall struggling years’.34 A descendent, Keith purchase or rent an estate or estates of Smithies, works at the Development land, which shall be cultivated by the Trusts Association today. members who may be out of employment, or whose labour may be badly remunerated. The true socialism? The term socialism today usually That as soon as practicable, this society implies a political system in which the shall proceed to arrange the powers of state takes centre stage, nationalising production, distribution, education, and land and other natural resources, government, or in other words to establish directing manufacturing and commercial a self-supporting home-colony or united activities, and using wealth produced interests, or assist other societies in by the people to provide them with goods establishing such colonies.33 and welfare services according to their needs. The original use of the term The Society encountered many problems was very different, indeed was wholly in its formative years, but the characters opposed to the notion of a dominant of the initial pioneers were decisive in controlling state. The first documented overcoming these problems, and not least use of ‘socialist’ in the Oxford English of their qualities was humour: Dictionary is in a letter in The Cooperative Magazine, London, November 1827. Of the ‘Famous Twenty-eight’ old There it referred to the ideas propagated Pioneers, who founded the store by by Robert Owen and his followers
A history of community asset ownership 41 that society should consist of a of those who knew best, the professional federation of self-governing and largely classes. A long way indeed from the self-sufficient communities. original socialist vision that working people could live and prosper in When many of the early co-operative self-governing and co-operative experiments failed, others started to look communities, where they exercised towards action by central government ownership and control. rather than local communities to establish common or mutual ownership. For some the way to achieve this was through universal suffrage and political control of Parliament. For others the route to socialism was through armed insurrection and mass revolution. But either way the goal was to seize power at the centre and direct the resources of the nation, through machineries of command and control. Marx and Engels wanted to use the term socialist rather than communist in their 1848 manifesto, but they realised it would have created a confusion with the Owenite version which was at that time still current, though soon to be overshadowed by the Marxist usage and a little later by that of the Fabians.
The Fabians constructed a model of socialism which they claimed could be achieved through a programme of nationalisation and delivery of welfare services directed by national government, with some tasks delegated to local municipalities elected by the people, but with effective control in the hands
42 Development Trusts Association Communities built by working people
William Thompson, economist and advocate for feminism, believed that finance for co-operative communities would need to come from the working classes themselves, and they should have full ownership of their assets. Such ideas were drawn on by early trade unionists, and in the 1840s in the Potteries, and in the Sheffield steelworks, trade unions raised money from working people, to establish rural communities in England and in America. The greatest experiment of this kind was undertaken by the Chartist Feargus O’Connor, who founded five working class communities from 1846 to 1848, all with investment drawn from working people themselves. He set up the Chartist Land Company as well as a Land and Labour Bank, and 70,000 working people from the slums of the industrial cities raised nearly £100,000. This visionary scheme was tragically defeated by a lack of capital, an over-optimistic business plan, attacks by a hostile press, attempts to discredit the concept by commissioners of the hated Poor Law, and refusal of Parliament to allow the company legal status.
William Thompson schemes. Thompson also believed in William Thompson, an Irish economist, the necessity of the workers in any political writer, and supporter of female co-operative community having security emancipation, was one of the first of ownership of the community's utopian socialists to believe in the ability land and capital property. In 1830 of the working class to create its own Thompson published Practical Directions future. Thompson did not share Robert for the Speedy and Economical Owen’s faith that wealthy industrialists Establishment of Communities, on the would provide capital for the new principles of Mutual Cooperation, United communities, and believed there was Possessions and Equality of Exertions greater potential if working people and of the Means of Enjoyment, in which themselves were to finance their own he remarked:
A history of community asset ownership 43 If done without any aid from the rich and The system of Co-operative Industry idle, how animating to the industrious accomplishes this, not by the vain search classes! – to the rich, the selfish, what a after foreign markets throughout the humiliating reproach! globe, no sooner found than over-stocked and glutted by the restless competition In the same work he defined community of the starving producers, but by the as follows: voluntary union of the industrious or productive classes, in such numbers An association of persons, in sufficient as to afford a market to each other,by numbers, and living on a space working together for each other, for the of land of sufficient extent to supply mutual supply, directly by themselves, by their own exertions all of each of all their most indispensable wants, in other’s wants. the way of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture. Community denotes common exertion and common benefit, common exertion according to the capabilities Trade union communities of each individual directed in the Several early trade unions attempted way most conducive to the common to establish communities where working good, and common benefit according people could live in prosperity and to the varying states and wants of dignity, emancipated from the industrial each individual so as to produce slums – drawing on their own financial as nearly as our best directed efforts resources rather than going cap in hand can accomplish, equal happiness to the state or to wealthy philanthropists. to all. In 1844 William Evans, who ran a He hoped his instructions would make newsagent’s shop in Shelton where he the establishment of co-operative sold works by Wollstonecraft, Rousseau communities as easy as for that of ‘any and Emerson, proposed to the newly ordinary manufacture’. He also believed formed Trades Union of Operative Potters that communities would provide markets that they throw their financial resources for each other, and that commerce would into a Joint Stock Emigration Company, flourish as a result, with consequences to establish a model community in entirely beneficial to society: Illinois. He aimed to persuade 5,000
44 Development Trusts Association potters to buy a £1 share in the scheme, unions took up the idea of land paying a shilling a week, producing a colonies. The Edge Tool Grinders working capital of £5,000. By October acquired a farm of sixty-eight acres at 1844 all the potters’ lodges had voted in Wincobank ‘with a view to employing favour of the scheme, and subscriptions their surplus hands’, and the File were collected. Emigrants were to be Hardeners acquired a similar farm chosen by ballot when subscriptions elsewhere. The Brittannia Metal Smiths reached each successive £50 level. established an eleven-acre farm at They would arrive to find a cabin built Gleadless Common Side, employing for them, five acres of land broken a manager and a dozen men who and sowed with wheat and corn, and supplied a shop which sold the produce fifteen acres awaiting cultivation. at market prices. Employees were paid 14s a week with 6d for each This proved no hollow promise. The dependent child.35 Union purchased land in Wisconsin and settled 134 individuals on 1,600 acres. Unfortunately, back in the The Chartist Land Plan Potteries, the unity of the pottery Just off junction 17 on the M25 on workers fell apart when a rival union the outskirts of London, a quiet country was established. There was also discord lane leads to the village of Heronsgate in Wisconsin about equitable allocation with its imposing houses, immaculate of the land, which impeded the process lawns, expensive cars. But here and of legalising the potters’ possession of there within the spacious gardens lie the land. The immigrants complained small cottages, and the narrow lanes, of the heat, the water, the Indians, designed for carts rather than cars, and the sandy soil. In June 1850 a are named not after poets or war heroes meeting of settlers in Fort Winnebago or local councillors, but commemorate raised charges of misrepresentation, rather a series of industrial towns: corruption and incompetence. Halifax, Nottingham, Bradford, and By January 1851 the Emigration Society Stockport. For this was once O’Connorville, was abandoned, and the trade union a community designed and built movement in the Potteries was by working people for themselves, set back many years. Elsewhere in a memorial to the aspirations of mid Sheffield around 1848 other trades nineteenth-century Chartism.36
A history of community asset ownership 45 In 1838, and again in 1842, the Chartists he published a booklet, ‘A Practical Work had drawn up petitions calling for universal on the Management of Small Farms.’37 suffrage and annual elections, as a means of securing political power for all people Investment, he believed, would have to rather than merely the privileged minority. come from working people themselves. In They had travelled to town and village, 1845 O’Connor proposed that a company collecting signatures. In Yorkshire when be formed and capital of £5,000 be town meetings were banned they met by raised from two thousand shares bought torchlight at night on the moors, and at last by working people for £2.10s each. This the petitions, bearing millions of signatures, would allow 120 acres of good land to be were carried with ceremony to Parliament. brought at the current price of £18.15s Twice the petitions were presented, and an acre, providing sixty cultivators, twice they were dismissed. selected by lot, with two acres each and £2,250 to buy cottages and stock. The Feargus O’Connor, leader of the radical allotments would be let by the company wing of the Chartist movement, came up to the members in perpetuity at £5 a year with a plan to settle large numbers of (providing total rental income to the working people on the land, each man company of £300 a year). By selling twenty holding property with an annual rental years of the rental income the company value of at least forty shillings, sufficient could raise a further £6,000, which would to qualify for a county vote. The aim was buy land for 72 families. Their rent would be simple: when enough working people had capitalised in the same way and would buy obtained property qualifications, the land for 86 families, and so on. people would be able to vote themselves the reforms which those in power had O’Connor travelled to France and Belgium denied them. O’Connor was editor of the and met socialist and communist leaders, Northern Star and in April and May 1843 including Marx and Engels. They were his newspaper ran a series of letters vehemently opposed, regarding private (written by himself) addressed to the land ownership as the basis of opposition ‘producers of wealth’, and suggesting to change in society. O’Connor was not that 20,000 acres could support 5,000 discouraged, remaining firm in his belief families, with four acres per family, in forty that by owning a cottage and a piece of estates, each with its community centre, land, people would achieve fulfilment, school, library and hospital. Subsequently independence and liberty.
46 Development Trusts Association h rts irr or,162.S.1 Board, © The British Library
Map of O'Connorville, 1847
A history of community asset ownership 47 O’Connor claimed that his plan would Act of Parliament apply for a royal give everyone a chance to work for charter, available for non-profit-making himself, would solve the problems of benevolent activities or for single criminal law, dispense with many of the purposes such as building a railway. All burdens of government and a standing were expensive (the cost of a private Act army, and provide sanitary improvements of Parliament if uncontested was about and educational aid. In the Northern Star £2,500) and none were entirely suitable. on 12th August 1848 he also claimed that Initially O’Connor opted for the joint stock the plan would reduce the suppression of route, and approached the Registrar of wages of the industrial poor: ‘With my Joint Stock Companies, achieving operations I will thin the artificial labour provisional registration as a joint stock market by employing thousands who are company. The company was originally now destitute, and constituting an idle called the Chartist Land Company, then reserve to enable capitalists to live and the Chartist Co-operative Land Company, make fortunes upon reductions of wages.’ and finally the National Land Company. O’Connor insisted that he intended no socialism (on the Owenite model) nor Working people asked why they could partnership with the state. Ownership and not save to buy the freehold on their control were always to reside with the allotment. So in August 1846 O’Connor individual, and O’Connor described proposed to found a Land Bank where himself as an ‘elevator’ not a ‘leveller’. members could deposit money at 4% interest, and save towards the £250 The Land Plan office was set up at 83 purchase cost of their allotment. Deposits Dean Street in Soho. The legal form of would progressively reduce an allottee’s the new company was the first obstacle. rent. A levy of 3d per share per annum Charitable registration was impossible was made to cover expenses of the bank, because of the Plan’s commercial arrangements of the company, and aspects. The Registrar of Friendly directors wages, and in January 1847 the Societies ruled that the company was not Land and Labour Bank went into operation. a type of savings scheme and was therefore ineligible. The remaining options The Land Plan was widely promoted were to establish a joint stock company and Chartist branches across the country (which required prescribed forms of collected 3d or 6d a head towards governance and account keeping), or by shares. By April 1846, 1,487 people had
48 Development Trusts Association paid in full, enough to establish the In 1847 O’Connor stood for election to first settlement, so O’Connor and his Parliament in a Nottingham by-election. colleagues started to travel in search of In a campaign speech O’Connor land. In September 1846 he visited Devon described the case of Charlie Tawes, an but was not impressed, calling it the allottee who had come from Radford to ‘land of Parsons, sour cider, and low O’Connorville. Charlie had been shut wages.’ He settled on a piece of farmland up in a ‘Whig bastille’ (a workhouse), outside Rickmansworth, and named separated from his wife and children. it O’Connorville. Now he had been reunited with them and The model cottages at O’Connorville had raised to independence. Now he had four three rooms: a sitting room, kitchen, pigs in his sty (tremendous cheering). bedroom, and next to them outhouses for Would he have ever got them by sticking in a cow, pony, cart, wash-house, dairy, Radford workhouse? If the government wood, fowls, and pigsties. The company would put half the money spent on building provided equipment, farm stock, manure, workhouses into buying land for poor men, and fruit trees. O’Connor was determined it would destroy the new Poor Law system. that quality should be high and the cottages were roomy, well lit, with oak O’Connor won a surprise victory. Across plank floors and good cast iron grates. As the country working people rejoiced. In the town was being built, working people Barnsley candles were lit in every working holding shares would turn up from all over class window and the Chartist flag of England, finger the seasoned oak, and green and pink hung over the streets. exclaim ‘Eh! But that’s rare stuff!’ Over the next two years, working people A ballot was held to select the first continued to buy shares and money thirty five settlers, and they arrived on poured in. By the end of 1847 O’Connor 1st May 1847. It was, according to was able to claim that over 60,000 O’Connor, ‘England’s “May Day”’, and members were holding 180,000 shares, a band struck up the tune ‘See the and £90,000 of capital had been conquering heroes come’. At the official accumulated. Further settlements were opening on 17th August 1847 O’Connor built at Lowbands, Minster Lovell, Snigs stood on a platform jubilantly waving End, and Great Dodford. Education was a giant cabbage. always a core objective: ‘The mind has
A history of community asset ownership 49 Chartist cottage at Great Dodford
not been forgotten, as each house is milkman, servant, gardener, lacemaker, fitted up with a neat and elegant library.’ overlooker, warehousemen, tinman, clerk, Schools were built and schoolmasters thatcher, plumber, painter, plasterer, appointed, employed by the Land mechanic, clothier, fustian cutter, grinder, Company. The allottees represented a bricklayer, trunkmaker, seamstress, cross-section of the mid-nineteenth warper, turner, carpenter, slater, century working classes. Former schoolmistress, cotton band maker. occupations included: Life in the new settlements was difficult: Coalminer, weaver, labourer, calico the urban settlers were unskilled in rural printer, shoemaker, limeburner, block trades, and often arrived malnourished printer, stockinger, baker, woolcomber, and in poor health. Nevertheless, initial innkeeper, smith, tailor, stonecutter, enthusiasm was high and by 1848 cabinetmaker, joiner, potter, cordwainer, some of the allotments were, literally, mason, grocer, piecer, moulder, nailer, bearing fruit. One claimed to have victualler, postman, skinner, butcher, 700 fruit-bearing trees: apples, pears, embroiderer, farmer, hatter, spinner, gooseberries and currants.
50 Development Trusts Association Attempts were made to find customers attempt to achieve this. National and for produce. At Great Dodford the settlers regional newspapers began to attack the cultivated strawberries and made jam company’s business methods, pointing for sale in markets in Bromsgrove and out with sanctimonious glee that while Birmingham. At Lowbands and Snigs incorporation remained unresolved, the End market gardens were developed to legal rights of working people in the supply Gloucester. At O’Connorville settlements were uncertain. This created some residents became cobblers and a crisis of confidence. Receipts dropped carpenters, providing services to the quickly towards the end of 1847 and agricultural community. Outbuildings some of the lucky winners in the ballots were sometimes converted into small promptly sold their allotments, for workshops, and at Great Dodford wives amounts between £70 and £120. and daughters started making bonnets. O’Connor found it hard to hold his tongue Some allottees demonstrated a sound and addressed the editor of one national business sense, co-operating to buy coal paper as ‘You unmitigated ass! You and groceries at wholesale prices. sainted fowl! You canonised ape!’ But O’Connor was falling under personal strain. Like many a modern community In February 1848 O’Connor, desperate to activist he found himself doing too achieve legal status, presented a petition much of everything, describing himself to Parliament to legalise the company as ‘bailiff, contractor, architect, engineer, through Act of Parliament, and the Bill surveyor, farmer, dungmaker, cow and received a first reading. It was not pig jobber, milkman, horse jobber and immediately rejected, probably because Member of Parliament.’ He started the government did not want to be held drinking heavily. responsible for dashing the hopes of so many working people. A date for a The uncertainty of the company’s legal second reading was appointed and a status was a great burden. In an attempt Parliamentary investigation began. to meet the regulations for the deed of Complaints started to surface from within registration, the company directors were the company. Meetings of Directors and advised (wrongly it seems) that they dissident representatives were called, to needed to collect 40,000 signatures. The which O’Connor was not invited, and he company’s representatives travelled from used the columns of the Northern Star to town to town in a weary and expensive vent his frustration and anger.
A history of community asset ownership 51 The enquiry took evidence from a Poor There were accusations of financial Law specialist, who pointed out that mismanagement, even suggestions that tenants would be eligible for poor relief O’Connor had been lining his own by virtue of length of residence and level pockets by tricking the poor. Clutching of rent they paid, and this meant that if bundles of paper, O’Connor pulled out the allotments failed and the tenants records and accounts. A government threw themselves on the parish for relief, accountant claimed they were rural parishes would be forced to levy a unintelligible, so O’Conner took him to massive increase in poor rates and this Great Dodford and showed him more would suddenly reduce to nothing the piles of papers. Patiently the accountant value of every property in the parish. His examined them all. His conclusion was conclusion was that the settlements were a vindication of O’Connor: ‘I am not sustainable, and therefore that they thoroughly satisfied, not only that the were likely to lead to ‘serious and sudden whole of the money has been honourably burthens upon the poor’s rates of those appropriated and is fully accounted for, parishes in which they acquire land.’ but also that several thousand pounds He noted that the allottees were not yet more of Mr O’Connor’s own funds have paying rent, that manure provided in the been applied in furtherance of the views first year had been used up and not of the National Land Company.’ replaced, that some of the settlers had already fled the land. So far O’Connor was standing his ground, but there was worse to come. O’Connor replied that the settlements A government barrister, Edward Lawes, were viable, and that he had provided asserted that the company was ‘a market, better than the gin-palace established for the purpose of an illegal or the beer-shop, for those who had lottery, where many paid but only a few small savings to carry to the labour field.’ would gain. Subscriptions from 70,000 One of the committee members travelled (of whom about half had fully paid up) to Snigs End and Lowbands to see had been necessary to locate 250 people for himself. He was surprised at the high in the new villages. A single subscription standard of building and cultivation could never suffice because the cost per on Lowbands. Wheat and potatoes, location was between £200 and £300. he reported, were as good as those of Total subscriptions amounted to £91,000. any farmers. £35,000 had been spent on buying land,
52 Development Trusts Association £50,000 on forming and building estates, whom had acted in good faith, should be £4,000 on expenses of management. allowed to wind up the undertaking and Cash assets were £7,000 but there were relieve themselves of the penalties to debts to the Land bank of £6,800 and at which they had subjected themselves. least £3,000 was owing to O’Connor. So Finally, careful to give the appearance there was no money to build more estates, that the government was critical only of unless the reproductive principle, whereby the methods, and not of the social rental income would be capitalised to raise objectives of the company, the Committee the investment for the next estate, and so stated that ‘it should be left entirely open on, could be proved viable. to the parties concerned to propose to Parliament any new measure for carrying Lawes claimed it could not. As the out the expectations and objects of the number of subscribers was 70,000, promoters of the company.’ and the cost per allotment £300, the sum needed was £21m. Fully paid up This was a crushing defeat. In the shares from the 70,000 subscribers Northern Star O’Connor attempted to would bring in capital of £273,000. present the verdict in the best possible The government accountants showed light. He implied that contributions from that by mortgaging and re-mortgaging, the poor alone were inadequate to the original capital could grow to a total capitalise such projects, pointing out (with of £819,000. This would locate 2,730 justice) that subsidy on a large scale was people, but leave 67,270 members provided by the government of the day unprovided for. Moreover, the scheme for other projects in the national interest, would take longer to realise its benefits such as railway and mining schemes. than the lives of its members: even However, the spirit of common enterprise if all the capital were mortgaged and eroded rapidly, and now everyone looked each new estate were bought and only to their own interests. The tenants built within a year, the company would were determined to acquire a title deed take 75 years to house its members. and not to pay rent, the unallotted On 30th July the Committee delivered its members wanted no-one to get a penny verdict to the House of Commons. The before the final dividend and demanded company in its present form was illegal, that back rent be paid, the directors and and accounts were imperfectly kept. The staff wanted to extricate themselves large number of people involved, all of and leave O’Connor to carry the full
A history of community asset ownership 53 responsibility for failure, and O’Connor the Land Plan had diverted the energies wanted payment of his own expenses. and resources of working people away from their efforts.38 Relations between O’Connor and the allottees became tense. Some who O’Connor was now suffering badly. refused to pay rent were letting their His red hair began to turn white and he houses and land to others and drawing was said to be drinking heavily. He was good rent for them, so O’Connor losing control and in August 1849 he threatened to sell the estates, and wrote a bizarre letter to Queen Victoria dissident groups emerged among the beginning ‘Well Beloved Cousin’, and tenants. Despite everything, during 1849 signing himself as ‘Your Majesty’s Cousin, the Company pursued attempts to Feargus, Rex, by the Grace of the register the company under the Joint People.’ For a while O’Connor rallied; Stock Companies Act. Building continued he went on a speaking tour of the at Great Dodford, and sowing and Scottish branches and was received with planting at the other estates. acclaim. Support also came from the pioneer sociologist Harriet Martineau, But O’Connor was under attack from who wrote two open letters on the all sides and even within the Chartist capabilities of two and a quarter acres movement he was isolated. In April 1848 of land to support her household of the last great Chartist petition had been five, with the labour of one man from the presented to Parliament, in a wagon workhouse. But nothing now could save drawn by four horses from O’Connor’s the scheme. In June 1850 the courts estate at Snigs End, trimmed with red, rejected the attempts to register the green and white streamers. But when company. In July a petition was made the petition had been examined it was to wind up the company, and in 1851 found to contain far fewer signatures it was finally closed down. than claimed. O’Connor had become frantic and abusive and fled the chamber. In 1852 O’Connor assaulted a policeman Many of the national Chartist leaders after a row at the Lyceum Theatre and attacked O’Connor, claiming he was spent seven days in prison. News began ruining their cause by his extreme views to circulate that he was neglected and and erratic behaviour. Others in the in need, and working people responded co-operative movement complained that quickly and generously: a fund was
54 Development Trusts Association started in March, and allottees and although the local pub bears the name members from across the country ‘The Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty.’ subscribed what they could. After a while some of the original Chartist cottages in the other settlements were But in June O’Connor was taken to a also replaced with larger houses, although clinic for the insane at Chiswick. He quite a few have survived and one at considered himself a state prisoner, and Great Dodford is maintained by the regarded his confinement with ‘grave National Trust in its original condition. Soon pride.’ In 1854 the first signs of epilepsy the memories of the original settlers had appeared, and in 1855 his sister removed passed into local folklore, and for years him from the clinic to her home. On 30th afterwards the story was told of the man, August he died and on 10th September arriving at Charterville (Minster Lovell) from large crowds followed the coffin to Kensal the northern slums, who, it was said, had Green cemetery. The epitaph reads: never seen a pig before and chastised it for noisiness. Reader, pause, thou treadest on O’Connor has not been treated kindly the grave of a patriot. by historians. For some the fact that he While philanthropy was an outspoken Irishman was sufficient is a virtue, and to condemn him as a demagogue. patriotism not a crime, Early accounts of Chartism were written will the name of by more moderate Chartists, who feared O’CONNOR that O’Connor’s radicalism jeopardised be admired and this public acceptance of their cause. They monument respected. criticised his community experiments, believing that they were a distraction By 1858 at O’Connorville, soon to be from the primary goal of universal renamed Heronsgate, only three of the suffrage, which they considered to be original settlers were left. Because the the only path to justice and prosperity. estate was close to London, the houses Today, in the knowledge that the right to were bought up by well-off people who vote has not, on its own, produced these enjoyed the privacy given by the large universal benefits, O’Connor’s vision grounds about the house. Not much is has more resonance than ever. left in Heronsgate of its radical past,
A history of community asset ownership 55 Model villages and garden cities
The work of Robert Owen and O’Connor had an impact on efforts by industrial philanthropists such as Titus Salt, George Cadbury, Joseph Rowntree and William Hesketh Lever, who built model villages for their factory workers. Lever’s attempt to establish ‘Port Fishlight’ in the Shetlands led to an offer to transfer land ownership to the islanders themselves, but the offer was turned down. Ebenezer Howard created the Garden City movement, in Letchworth, Welwyn and elsewhere. One of Howard’s core principles was that land would be community-owned, and income from the land would fund community amenities.
The industrial philanthropists was good quality, with piped supplies The work of Robert Owen and of fresh water and gas at Saltaire O’Connor had an impact on efforts by (unheard of in the slums of Bradford) industrial philanthropists to build model and leading architects and designers communities for working people: were employed at New Earswick. examples included Titus Salt at Saltaire Environmental considerations were given near Bradford, George Cadbury at a high priority: at Saltaire a spacious Bourneville near Birmingham and Joseph park was designed and the course of Rowntree at New Earswick outside York. the river Aire was altered to improve the William Hesketh Lever’s model town at view; at Bourneville and New Earswick Port Sunlight in the Wirral was the one tenth of the land was reserved for inspiration for a West End musical, which gardens and green space. The value of claimed the distinction of first bringing garden produce at Bourneville was the tango to England. estimated as equivalent to a saving of two shillings a week on the rents for In many ways these were remarkable householders, and Cadbury declared that achievements. The impact on the quality ‘no man ought to be compelled to live of life of residents was profound: the where a rose cannot grow’. Public baths, annual infant mortality rate at Bourneville washhouses, schools, hospitals, and and Port Sunlight was half that prevailing libraries were provided, and at Port in Birmingham and Liverpool. Housing Sunlight even an art gallery.
56 Development Trusts Association Both Cadbury and Rowntree encouraged community. He wrote in a private residents to elect a village council, memorandum: ‘I do not want to establish and to manage various local amenities, communities bearing the stamp of charity notably community centres. Community but rather of rightly ordered and self- ownership however was denied, governing communities – self-governing, and control remained in the hands of that is, within the broad limits laid down the industrialists through the family-run by the Trust.’39 Despite this declaration, charitable trusts which they created. Rowntree and his descendents were As a consequence they were able to unwilling to let go of ownership or impose their own beliefs, values - decision making, and New Earswick, as and idiosyncrasies. with other model communities, never passed into community control. The sale of alcohol was forbidden in most model communities, and smoking, gambling and swearing were not allowed Community asset in public in Saltaire. Titus Salt forbade ownership rejected people to hang out their washing. At the There was, almost, one exception. factory at Bourneville corridors were William Hesketh Lever’s second arranged to keep boys and girls separate community experiment after Port Sunlight on their way to or from work, and they became known as Port Fishlight, and had separate recreation areas on either ended in an offer of transfer of land side of the main road. Also at Bourneville to community ownership. cottages provided for female employees were protected by night watchmen, one Lever visited the remote Western Isles of whose duties was to light fires in in 1884 and when the island of Lewis the afternoon so that the girls came came on the market in 1917 he bought it. home to a warm home in the evening. Two years later he also purchased the But Cadbury refused to employ married adjoining island of Harris and embarked women, believing that a wife’s place was upon a bold plan to transform the in the home. economy of the islands by modernising the fishing industry. There would be an Rowntree hoped that New Earswick ice-making factory at Stornoway, would become a self-governing refrigerated cargo ships to take fish to
A history of community asset ownership 57 a depot at Fleetwood, herring-curing islanders had been campaigning for. But facilities, a canning factory, and a plant by now mistrust ran very deep, and the installed to make fish-cakes, fish-paste, Highland Land League representing the glue, animal feed and fertiliser. To create crofters and all the district councils (with a market for the islanders’ fish, he bought the exception of Stornoway) turned down up no less than 350 fishmongers’ the offer, and so the islands were sold, shops throughout Britain, creating the once again, to absentee landlords. Macfisheries chain.
But in 1919 demobilised servicemen, Ebenezer Howard who had been promised ‘smallholdings and the Garden City fit for heroes’ after the war, started a In 1898 Ebenezer Howard, an obscure land invasion by occupying plots of court stenographer, published Tomorrow: farmland and erecting shelters for A Peaceful Plan to Real Reform. This book themselves and their families. Lever set out a vision of a garden city of 30,000 condemned the squatters and ordered people on a 6,000 acre estate, intended them off his land. This created local to combine the very best of town and animosity as indeed did Lever’s high- country life. Howard was consciously handed attitude towards the crofting way attempting to put into practice, on a large of life, which he regarded as an archaic scale, ideas he found in Herbert impediment to progress. The Scottish Spencer’s land scheme40 (itself deriving Office took the side of the squatters, in part from Thomas Spence’s land and these disputes, alongside financial plan), the model city of James Silk problems faced by Lever Brothers, meant Buckingham,41 Edward Bellamy’s utopian that works slowed down and the grand vision of state communism,42 and Henry plan was never fully realised. George’s land value taxation theories. The Garden City Association was formed In September 1923 Lever announced in 1899, and its members visited and that he intended to leave the island. admired experiments at Port Sunlight and At the same time he offered to gift all the Bourneville. In September 1903 the ‘First crofters the freehold of their land, and to Garden City Ltd’ was incorporated and hand over the rest of the island to district construction began at Letchworth, on trusts. This was exactly what some of the 3,800 acres costing £160,000.
58 Development Trusts Association Diagrams from Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, 1902
A history of community asset ownership 59 Letchworth attracted a stream of people choice of what it could do to improve keen to discover new ways of living: amenities for the community. This was a Tolstoyans, anarchists, vegetarians, trade radically different model from that which unionists, socialists, followers of Ruskin - applied elsewhere, where rising land even Lenin, who found refuge there for a values were enjoyed primarily as a source short time in 1907. George Orwell was to of profit for private landlords. The secret, say that in the garden city you could find claimed Howard, was to retain the land in ‘every fruit juice drinker, sandal wearer, common ownership and to build this into sex maniac, Quaker, nature cure quack, the plan from the outset. pacifist and feminist in England.’43 Schools were established on advanced principles: The influence of Letchworth spread the school diet was based on butter, milk, rapidly. Joseph Rowntree appointed eggs, fresh fruit, and vegetables, and Raymond Unwin, the gifted architect of morning assemblies were deliberative Letchworth, to design New Earswick rather than devotional. outside York. Hampstead Garden Suburb was begun in 1907. Plans were drawn up Howard’s approach was distinguished for garden cities across the country: at by its treatment of land values and Fallings Park near Wolverhampton, tenure arrangements. Land for the Warrington, Hull, Newport, and Bristol. settlement would be purchased by a One was Woodlands, a community Trust at agricultural land values (then planned for the employees of the about £40 per acre), with a rate of return Brodsworth Colliery near Doncaster. for investors of not more than 4%. All occupants would pay a rent (referred to In 1920, Howard, together with a group of as the rent-rate as there was to be no followers (including several Quakers) separate general rate levied by the local established the New Town Trust and then authority) and the income received in this the Welwyn Garden City Limited, with a way would be used for three purposes: capital of a quarter of a million pounds. to pay interest on the initial capital sum; An agricultural guild was set up to supply to pay back the capital; to pay for the the inhabitants of Welwyn with milk and general running costs, and welfare of the vegetables, using land leased from the garden city. Over a period of time the first Garden City Company. The business was two items of expenditure would fall away, kept separate from the Trust, and without and the Trust would be left with a greater ownership of the land it had nothing to
60 Development Trusts Association fall back on in time of financial difficulty. As a result it failed during the agricultural depression in the 1920s, and the land was re-let to tenant farmers.
A town planning profession began to emerge. The Garden Cities Association grew into the Town and Country Planning Association. The first Town Planning Act came into force in 1909 to regulate development, and in the same year a department of civic design was established at the Liverpool School of Architecture, funded by William Hesketh Lever (the founder of Port Sunlight). In the 1930s industrialists and their friends in government came to realise that garden cities provided for employers the housing and other amenities which their Victorian predecessors such as Titus Salt had to provide themselves. In Manchester the local authority purchased land and built Wythenshawe, on principles much diluted from those of Howard; there was for example no town centre. With large scale government investment, trading estates were established at Treforest in Glamorgan, Team Valley at Durham and Tyneside, and Hillington near Glasgow. These were often functional and uninspired places, and had little in common with Howard’s original vision.
A history of community asset ownership 61 Communities against the state
William Morris found in medieval guilds and socialism the inspiration for a way to alleviate the soulnessness of modern industrial society, and aimed to establish small semi-agricultural communities, writing A Dream of John Ball in 1888 and News from Nowhere in 1891. The belief that state government was inherently soul-destroying and that people could only find personal fulfilment in small self-governing communities close to nature found its fullest expression in colonies established by English followers of Kropotkin and Tolstoy, including eminent philosophers, social scientists, vegetarians and sandal makers.
William Morris for decisions would only be made if there In News from Nowhere published in 1890 was a strong majority in favour.44 William Morris imagined a future where all land and all facilities would be held in This would be a garden utopia, where common and used for the benefit of all people would take meals together, and people. National government would be everyone would be engaged in useful and abolished (and Morris imagines that in his creative work, ‘where nothing is wasted future utopia the Houses of Parliament and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary would be given a more productive function: dwellings, sheds, and workshops a storage place for manure). Government scattered up and down the country, all would be undertaken at local level within a trim and neat and pretty,’ in sharp commune, ward or parish, and power contrast to the blighted villages and cities would be exercised not through elected of the heavily industrialised England of representatives, but directly by the people. his time. Morris was no mere fantasist – he recognised that the transition to such a Decisions would be made by majority vote, society would be long and difficult, and but votes would only be taken after the that a period of class struggle and matter was first adjourned for discussion counter revolution would be inevitable. and debate. If the vote when it took place was a close one, there would be a further Morris hated the uniformity which he adjournment allowing for more discussion, believed would be produced by Fabian
62 Development Trusts Association state socialism, and warned of ‘the To have a score or fifty, even a hundred danger of the community falling into people penned together in a little bureaucracy, the multiplicity of boards community, they are bound either to and offices, and all the paraphernalia chafe and gall each other into a state of official authority, which is, after all a of exasperation and explosion, or else burden, even when it is exercised by if they are so likeminded as to have the delegation of the whole people and no serious differences it can only be in accordance with their wishes.’45 by reason of their exceeding narrowness He believed that small self-determining and sectarian character.47 communes would allow people to deal with problems ‘in conscious Morris is sometimes dismissed as association with each other’ and that the someone who yearned to recreate a variety this would produce was very romanticised, idealised past which never much to be welcomed: existed, but that is to trivialise the nature of his vision. As E P Thompson points It will be necessary for the unit of out, William Morris was ‘the first creative administration to be small enough for artist of major stature in the world, every citizen to feel himself responsible to take his stand, consciously and for its details, and be interested in them; without shadow of compromise, with the that individual men cannot shuffle off revolutionary working class.’48 Many of the business of life on to the shoulders Morris’ ideas would have resonated of an abstraction called the State, but with liberal social reformers, industrial must deal with it in conscious association philanthropists, Marxist socialists, with each other... Variety of life is as communitarian anarchists, and the pioneers much an aim of true Communism as of garden cities. Morris possessed the equality of condition, and... nothing but creative genius to imagine a synthesis of a union of these two will bring about all of this. real freedom.46
The size of community was a critical Kropotkin and the first factor. Too large and they would become anarchist communities impersonal, but too small and they would Prince Peter Kropotkin, the Russian also fail, as the socialist Edward anarchist, visited England in 1876, again Carpenter explained: in 1881-2, and then from 1886 he lived
A history of community asset ownership 63 much of the time in London and in fund, there were no wages, and each Brighton. True society, Kropotkin asserted, received pocket money according to would be restored by establishing free how the fund stood. Eating was village communities. In response to communal. They sold produce to the Social Darwinism and T H Huxley’s Sunderland and Newcastle Co-operatives Struggle for Existence (1888) with its and traded with the Newcastle Green insistence on the survival of the fittest, market. The settlement was visited by Kropotkin published a series of articles, the trade unionist Tom Mann, Kropotkin including ‘The Coming Reign of Plenty’ himself, and others, and kept going and ‘The Industrial Village of the until the turn of the century. Future’, showing how the guilds and free communes of medieval Europe afforded examples of non-political Count Leo Tolstoy institutions freely co-operating.49 In 1892 Count Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist he reprinted these articles in book form and philosopher, rejected the modern as Conquete du Pain (translated in state and all efforts to organise the 1906 as The Conquest of Bread). external condition of people’s lives, Here and elsewhere he argued for which he believed were a divergence ‘a society without a state’, a federation from the inner needs of mankind. of free communes. He called for an organic society based on self-government and co-operation of An anarchist colony at Norton Hall free men working in federated groups: near Shefffield was set up by followers small communities with as close a of the socialist Edward Carpenter, connection to nature as possible, based on much influenced by Kropotkin’s ideas. a form of Christianity purged of dogmas The colonists were teetotal, vegetarian, and mysticism, ‘not promising future bliss, non-smoking, grew lettuce and but giving bliss on earth.’50 manufactured sandals. A further attempt to test the theories propounded by In 1894 his followers established the Kropotkin took place at Clousden Hill Brotherhood Trust and set up a grocery near Newcastle. Here in 1895 four men, and vegetable co-operative in Downham two with small families, took a farm Rd, Kingsland, in North London – all the consisting of 20 acres of poor land. profits including the customer dividend They pooled their money into a common were to be used to purchase land to
64 Development Trusts Association establish communities. In 1897 a community was established at Purleigh on a twenty-three-acre estate, with fruit trees and a kitchen garden, and a printing press. It foundered over debates about whether or not to admit homeless vagrants, and internal dissension was compounded by the mental instability of some of its leaders. Other communities were formed in Essex, Leeds, and Blackburn, and also at Leicester where in Braunstone in 1899 five vegetarians acquired half an acre of land and formed a land society to acquire more.
Another Tolstoyan colony at Stroud, near Whiteway, quarrelled over the question of land ownership. One member wanted the land to be reconveyed to the ‘Real and Eternal Owner’, but as this did not meet the requirements of the law they registered under the names of three members, then ceremoniously burnt the land deeds: ‘we had a very merry time burning the deeds,’ they reported.
A history of community asset ownership 65 Land value taxation
Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty in 1879 explained how the expropriation of land and other common assets by the few was creating poverty for the many. His solution was a single tax, on increases in land value. The Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain was an advocate for these measures, and Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported by Winston Churchill, tried to introduce a land tax based on Henry George’s ideas in his budget of 1909. The House of Lords, scandalised by this assault on hereditary property rights, blocked the budget, and provoked a constitutional crisis. A further attempt was made in 1913 but was abandoned on the outbreak of the First World War in the interests of national unity. Ramsey MacDonald introduced the 1931 Land Valuation Act, but his Labour government fell and the Act was repealed within four months. In 1975 Labour introduced a Community Land Act giving local authorities power to borrow money for compulsory purchase of land at a price which discounted development gain, but a financial crisis prevented application of the Act and the legislation was later repealed by the Conservatives.
Henry George less developed California. This insight led Born in Philadelphia, Henry George went to his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, to sea before the mast at the age of 15, which was a huge success, selling over was an unsuccessful gold miner in two million copies. California, and then worked his way up through the newspaper industry, starting as This association of poverty with progress a printer and ending up editor and owner. is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring On a visit to New York, George was struck industrial, social, and political difficulties by the paradox that the poor in that city that perplex the world, and with which were much worse off than the poor in statesmanship and philanthropy and
66 Development Trusts Association education grapple in vain. From it come Poverty deepens as wealth increases, the clouds that overhang the future of and wages are forced down while the most progressive and self-reliant productive power grows, because land, nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx which is the source of all wealth and of Fate puts to our civilization and which the field of all labor, is monopolized. not to answer is to be destroyed. So long To extirpate poverty, to make wages what as all the increased wealth which modern justice commands they should be, the full progress brings goes to build up great earnings of the laborer, we must therefore fortunes, to increase luxury and make substitute for the individual ownership of sharper the contrast between the House land a common ownership. Nothing else of Have and the House of Want, progress will go to the cause of the evil - in nothing is not real and cannot be permanent. else is there the slightest hope.52 The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new The question was how to achieve this? story but hastens the final catastrophe. George considered the ideas of Herbert To educate men who must be Spencer, who in Social Statics had condemned to poverty, is but to make proposed that land should be held in them restive; to base on a state of common, and leased in lots to the highest most glaring social inequality political bidders (much as Thomas Spence had institutions under which men are suggested a century before). But George theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid was quick to recognise that such a solution on its apex.51 would present a ‘shock to present customs and habits of thought’ and an ‘extension George attempted to give an economic of government machinery - which is to be explanation for the growth of poverty avoided.’ George came up with an in an age of massively increased alternative. Believing that it was unjust industrial productivity. He argued that that those who had appropriated natural much of the wealth created by social and resources were allowed to profit from them, technological advances is captured by while productive activity on the other hand land owners and others who monopolise was burdened by taxation, George’s natural resources. The only remedy solution was both radical and simple. therefore was to bring about a Landowners would be allowed to retain fundamental change in the system of their land ownership, but all taxation should land ownership. be replaced by a single tax on land value.
A history of community asset ownership 67 a fairer distribution of wealth, but it would also encourage and increase productivity, for both capitalists and labouring classes would receive their full reward. Productivity and justice could exist in harmony, and poverty would be ended.
Well may the community leave to the individual producer all that prompts him to exertion; well may it let the laborer have the full reward of his labor, and the capitalist the full return of his capital. For the more that labor and capital produce, the greater grows the common wealth in which all may share. And in the value or rent of land is this general gain expressed in a definite and concrete Henry George form. Here is a fund which the state may take while leaving to labor and I do not propose either to purchase capital their full reward. With increased or to confiscate private property in land. activity of production this would The first would be unjust; the second, commensurately increase. needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, Government would change its character, possession of what they are pleased to and would become the administration of call their land. Let them continue to call a great co-operative society. It would it their land. Let them buy and sell, and become merely the agency by which the bequeath and devise it. We may safely common property was administered for leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. the common benefit.54 It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.53 In 1886 George ran for mayor of New York, and polled second (ahead of Not only, according to George, would a Theodore Roosevelt). He ran again in land value tax be the means to achieve 1897, but died four days before the
68 Development Trusts Association election. An estimated 100,000 people a tax on land values. In the 1880s the attended his funeral. George’s ideas were Liberal government passed legislation to partially adopted in South Africa, Taiwan, enable Irish tenants to buy their own Hong Kong, and Australia, where land. The legislation did not apply to other state governments still levy a land value parts of the United Kingdom, but it was tax, but at a low level and with many still a controversial move, and many exemptions. A follower of George, Lizzie Whig landowners broke away and joined Maggie, created ‘The Landlord's Game’ the Conservatives. in 1904 to popularise his theories. This led to the modern board game, Monopoly. The 1909 ‘People’s budget’ of Lloyd George imposed a modest tax (1d in the pound) on the capital value of all Joseph Chamberlain undeveloped urban and suburban land. and Lloyd George He also proposed a new tax of 20% of Towards the end of the nineteenth the unearned increment on land values, century the Land Nationalisation Society that is, the increase in value that arose called for total abolition of private land from a public decision or public spending ownership. In the ‘People’s Land Charter’ such as the building of a new road next it called for the state to become owner of to an estate, rather than the landlord’s all land and the minerals it contained; own actions. ‘Who made 10,000 people local authorities would ensure that the owners of the soil and the rest of us land was put to the use that would best trespassers in the land of our birth?’ serve the community as a whole. asked Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a speech in Newcastle. However, these ideas were never Winston Churchill declared ‘No more fair, translated into a political programme, and consistent, or salutary proposals for instead it was the taxation approach of taxation have ever been made in the Hernry George that seemed most likely to House of Commons.’ succeed. The Liberal Party wrote principles of land value taxation into its constitution, The House of Lords disagreed and and Winston Churchill was among those wrecked the budget bill, provoking a who espoused the cause. In his ‘Radical constitutional crisis. The King supported Programme’ in 1885 the prominent Liberal the Lords, and there was no alternative politician Joseph Chamberlain also urged but to call a general election, but at
A history of community asset ownership 69 the election the Liberals lost their working purchase. The Secretary of State was majority. The government’s further attempts empowered to dispense with a public in 1913 to introduce land taxation and enquiry as a preliminary to a compulsory related measures were derailed by the purchase order. Local authorities, having First World War, when divisive issues such acquired land, had the responsibility of as this were thrust into the background in seeing that it was developed, either by the interests of national unity. themselves or by others. The price to be paid was the market price, less any Development Land Tax payable by the The 1931 Land Valuation owner. The tax was 80 per cent of Act and the 1975 Community development gains realised by the owner, Land Act and it was intended that the rate should A further attempt to embody these eventually be raised to 100 per cent. principles in law took place in 1931 when the Labour government of the day The price would exclude any ‘hope value’ introduced legislation similar to that of the land being later developed for other attempted by Lloyd George. The 1931 purposes. The cost of buying land, Land Valuation Act provided for the including costs of administration and valuation of all land with provision for the interest payments etc., would be financed revision of the valuation rolls every seven initially by borrowing, and would be repaid years, and a tax of 1d in the pound on from the proceeds of disposals. Land for the value of every acre of land. But two commercial and industrial development months later the Labour government was was to be made available on ground brought down and within four months the leases of normally not more than 99 years. ‘National Government’ which took office Land for residential purposes was to be repealed the Act. disposed of either as freehold, or by way of a building licence granted to the builder The Community Land Act of 1975, along whereby eventually the freehold would be with the Development Land Tax Act of conveyed to the house owner. 1976, was a further effort to empower communities to capture socially created The proposals stimulated considerable land value.55 Local authorities were given debate. The Conservatives vowed to the power to acquire land for public repeal the Community Land Act although ownership, by agreement or by compulsory they accepted the idea of a Development
70 Development Trusts Association Land Tax (indeed they had originally allocated for development by the local proposed it) provided that the tax level planning authorities. The three attempts was set at a lower rate. The government's were the 1947 Planning Act’s spending cuts of December 1976 reduced development charge, the 1967 Land the borrowing capacity of local authorities Commission Act’s betterment levy, and by £70m and this meant that there were the Development Land Tax Act of no funds available for acquisition of land. 1976, which complemented the 1975 When the Conservatives came to power Community Land Act. Each attempt in 1979 they repealed the Community failed, it is said, not because the Land Act and reduced the Development concept is wrong, but simply because Land Tax to 60 per cent. The no practicable system for collecting Development Land Tax was eventually betterment (the most useful shorthand repealed in the Finance Act 1985.56 term) can be devised. My contention is that none of the three systems was tried for long enough, and subjected to Time to try again? that continuing review, modification and In the 1970s professional bodies opposed improvement that applies, as it must, the Acts. The President of the Incorporated to every major taxation measure now in Society of Valuers and Auctioneers said: use. It is time we tried again.58 ‘Any suggestion that the Act should be retained and amended because the threat of repeal causes a greater level of uncertainty, should be opposed. A bad Act is a bad Act. A house of cards is no sounder because it has mosaic tiles on it.’57 However, this view has been challenged in recent times. In 2004 Wyndham Thomas CBE, Vice-President of the Town & Country Planning Association, pointed out that:
... since 1947 we have tried three times, and failed, to bring in a system for taxing increases in the value of land
A history of community asset ownership 71 Three acres and a cow
At the end of the nineteenth century, in response to rural depopulation and the plight of the urban working classes, Joseph Chamberlain took up ‘the Right to Dig’ as his campaign slogan, claiming that with three acres and a cow, working people could become self-sufficient. An Act was passed in 1908 and as many as 30,000 families were settled on the land as a result. George Lansbury and the Board of Guardians at the Poplar workhouse founded farm colonies in Essex in the early 1900s. During the First World War, there were renewed calls to provide allotments for ex-servicemen, and in the 1930s the Land Settlement Association was founded by a combination of Quaker groups and the National Council of Social Service (later to become the National Council of Voluntary Organisations), to provide working communities on the land for the unemployed. Government investment was provided and many local councils transferred assets for this purpose. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War there were many small agricultural communities established by poets and pacifists – few survived for long.
The Right to Dig allotments to be let at fair rents to all In 1881 a Royal Commission revealed that labourers who might desire them, in plots 700,000 members of farm workers’ of up to one acre of arable and three or families had emigrated in the previous four acres of pasture.’ The ‘right to dig’ nine years. The slogan ‘three acres and a became a populist cause and in 1908 the cow’ was coined by the Liberal politician Small Holdings and Allotments Act was Jesse Collings for his land reform passed which led to large scale campaign of 1885, and later adapted for schemes, and as many as 30,000 families use in Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘Radical were settled as a result. Programme’. Chamberlain urged the purchase by local authorities of land ‘for During the First World War, Lloyd George the purpose of garden and field and others promised action ‘for settling
72 Development Trusts Association the gallant soldiers and sailors on the Londoners. Most came from the land’. The Board of Agriculture drew up workhouse, and many were former plans, and the Garden Cities and Town soldiers. A hundred men were housed in Planning Association gave advice. After corrugated iron huts and set to digging the War, there was an unprecedented reservoirs and building chicken huts. The growth of settlement on the land. Large plan was to turn the site into co-operative estates were broken up and put on smallholdings, but the Local Government the market, and in 1919 the Land Board refused to allow this. Settlement (Facilities) Act was passed. Its provisions came to an end in 1926 Lansbury and his colleagues on the but by then the number of statutory Board of Guardians soon came under smallholdings had doubled and the fierce attack. They were accused of number of associated houses had wasting ratepayers’ money, and the quadrupled. Unfortunately, during the government launched an enquiry. 1920s the price of farm produce fell The resulting report was critical, but the consistently and by 1929 most of those Board of Guardians refused to back who had moved onto the smallholdings down and eventually the authorities were forced out. decided not to take action. George Lansbury went on to become a member of the 1905 Royal Commission on the George Lansbury Poor Law and the Unemployed, and a In 1892 George Lansbury, a pacifist signatory to its minority report which and socialist, who was later to become recommended the dismantling of the MP for Bow and Bromley, Mayor of workhouse system. Poplar, and eventually leader of the Labour party, became a member of Encouraged by the experiments the Board of Guardians of the Poplar at Laindon and Hollesley Bay, Joseph Workhouse. He soon began a policy of Fels went on to purchase a 600-acre relief beyond the workhouse itself, and farm at Mayland in Essex, applying with support from Joseph Fels, an intensive horticultural principles American philanthropist, established two developed by Thomas Smith, who had ‘colonies’ at Laindon in Essex and already established a small socialist Hollesley Bay in Suffolk. The aim of these colony nearby. colonies was to settle unemployed
A history of community asset ownership 73 The Land Settlement Association The depression in the early 1930s led to renewed efforts to create rural communities as an answer to urban unemployment. The main stimulus came from the Quaker Society of Friends. The Friends noticed that allotments were going out of cultivation just as they could be of most value, because the plot-holders lacked money for seed and fertiliser, and those who did grow produce were financially penalised through reduction in welfare benefits.
The Friends Committee obtained a concession from the Ministry of Labour that the value of produce which could be sold from an allotment would not affect the amount of dole received. The Friends went on to advocate the idea of ‘group holdings’, using plots of land larger than an allotment but smaller than a smallholding. In 1933 pilot schemes were established in County Durham and elsewhere.
Also in 1933, a wealthy Quaker, Malcolm Stewart, offered £25,000 (provided that the government would match this pound for pound) to launch a more ambitious scheme, offering full-time holdings of about five acres for industrial workers. The scheme would also provide them with agricultural training, as well as facilities
74 Development Trusts Association © The Unseen Archive/Archant Suffolk
Land Settlement at Newbourne, 1964 for marketing their produce. The National Settlement Association was established in Council of Social Service (later NCVO) 1934, and eventually the government arranged a meeting with the Prime allocated £50,000 on the basis of £1 for Minister Ramsey MacDonald and the every £2 provided by the Association. minister of agriculture. The government prevaricated on the question of funding, Disappointed but undeterred the but encouraged the formation of a body Association raised grants from independent to take the idea forward. The Land sources (notably the Carnegie United
A history of community asset ownership 75 Kingdom Trustees). The first estate was at by the Association controlled farming Potton in Bedfordshire, which recruited decisions, and this was resented. mining families from County Durham and The Second World War impeded Northumberland. To support the initiative expansion of the programme as vacant several county councils leased or sold plots were ploughed up and specialist estates to the Association. By the end of advisors were dispersed in the war effort. the 1930s the Association held twenty Many were glad to see this happen. one estates, subdivided into more than Political factions on the Left and Right one thousand holdings. opposed land settlement, some thought it went too far, others not far enough. The Association encouraged the The Manchester Guardian looked forward development of co-operative methods to the demise of the programme: for purchasing, marketing and working ‘It should help to kill one of the legends arrangements; men and their wives that has haunted us since the last war were carefully selected (those who had (and for generations before that).’ already worked their own allotments were favoured), and training and supervision Nevertheless the Land Settlement were provided. The Association chose Association survived the wartime carefully where to invest its money, setbacks, and by the early 1970s average preferring areas with an established earnings of the Association’s tenants tradition of market gardening and rail were well above the average agricultural access to wholesale markets. Typically, wage, although there was considerable there was a home farm occupied by the variation across the country and even supervisor, with central buildings for within the estates. grading and packing, surrounded by about 40 smallholdings of 4-8 acres. Each family By 1982 there were still 3,900 acres was credited with £2,000 to set up the under cultivation, with 530 tenants and holding, and as well as houses they had 300 staff. The government announced pigs, chickens and goats and the option of that the tenants should take over a 30ft or 40ft greenhouse. It did not work responsibility for marketing their produce, for everyone. Nearly half of those admitted but would be allowed to purchase their for training (the prerequisite for settlement) holdings at half the current market price. returned home before completion or shortly Two estates were transformed into afterwards. The supervisors employed co-operatives (Foxash Growers in Essex
76 Development Trusts Association and Newbourn Growers in Suffolk), but the others were sold off, amid much acrimony, during the property boom of the early 1980s.
Poets and pacifists John Middleton Murry, editor of a literary magazine and one-time husband of the New Zealand novelist Katherine Mansfield, bought a farm at Langham in Essex in 1935. This was intended as a training ground for communitarian socialists. The Farm Group, as it came to be known, included Quakers, Plymouth Brethren, Catholics, ‘one mild-mannered man who professed himself a Satanist’, vegetarians, bicycle club enthusiasts, esperantists and nudists. Such a mixture was inevitably volatile. Murry later described them as a ‘chapter of cranks, sexually unfulfilled or frustrated’. He decided not to live there, and installed Max Plowman (a literary critic and expert on the prophetic works of William Blake) as its manager. It did not succeed.
There were many short-lived communities like this at the time of the Second World War, fuelled by 20,000 conscientious objectors, and a further 20,000 ‘outlaws’ who had evaded military service and were without identity cards. Few survived for long.
A history of community asset ownership 77 The growth of a ‘community sector’
The first settlements were founded by Oxford and Cambridge colleges in the 1880s, inventing a new profession of social work, campaigning for universal pensions and social security, and emerging as a focus for neighbourhood community action. In 1934, in the deprived community of Brynmawr in South Wales, a community-led regeneration programme was underway, with a community audit, amenity improvements, and community businesses providing work and income. This was perhaps the first development trust. In 1992 the Development Trusts Association was founded, promoting community asset ownership as a means of ‘transforming communities for good’. The 2003 ‘community right to buy’ legislation in Scotland and the 2007 Quirk review in England have pushed community assets up the agenda, and there are now over 450 development trusts across the UK with £489m of assets in community ownership.
Settlements of High Church academics at Keble The idea of the original settlements was College and the second was inspired by to create a place where Oxford and the more secular followers of John Ruskin, Cambridge students, during their such as Henrietta Barnett: there was a holidays, could work among the poor pitched battle on the Mile End Road and improve their lives. In effect, part-time between the followers of the two groups. missionary work in the darkest East End. The first settlements opened in 1885: Despite this inauspicious start, the Oxford House in Bethnal Green, and settlements soon made far-reaching Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. Both were impacts. They set themselves ambitious modelled on Oxford colleges, with their goals: scientific research concerning own chapels and libraries and at first poverty; the furthering of wider lives local working people were forbidden through education; and an enhancement entry. In the early years, there was intense of leadership in local communities. rivalry between Oxford House and They gained a reputation for attracting Toynbee Hall. The former was the creation the brightest young social reformers, and
78 Development Trusts Association many of the architects of the modern Blackfriars Settlement) began in 1887 welfare state passed their apprentice with the objective of promoting welfare years in the ‘settlements’ movement, and giving women and children ‘additional including William Beveridge, R. H. opportunities for education and recreation’. Tawney, and Clement Atlee. Above all, the early settlements led a In the East End, the settlements played campaign for the universal old age a central role in tackling the appalling pension. In 1883 Canon Barnett at conditions within which the majority lived. In Toynbee Hall advocated pensions of eight the summer of 1896 an epidemic of or ten shillings a week for all who had diphtheria and scarlet fever swept East kept themselves to the age of 60 without London and the settlements led the work-house aid. ‘If such pensions were campaign for improved sanitation and the right of all,’ he said, ‘none would be water supply. They also fought for local tempted to lie to get them, nor would any libraries, compulsory registration of lodging be tempted to spy and bully in order to houses, and free school milk. The early show the un-desert of applicants.’ The settlements were closely associated with Old Age Pensions Act finally came into the Poor Man’s Lawyer movement, which law in 1909.59 originated in 1891 when barrister Frank Tillyard began to give free legal advice to The Federation of Residential Settlements poor applicants at the Mansfield House was established in 1920, renamed the Settlement in Canning Town. They set great British Association of Residential store by education, running evening and Settlements, and later the British university extension classes, hoping to Association of Settlements and Social create ‘a working man’s university’. Action Centres, now known as Bassac.60 Albert Mansfield (a former student of In 1928 the British Association of Toynbee Hall) established the Workers’ Residential Settlements, together with the Educational Association in 1903. The Educational Settlements Association and Passmore Edwards Settlement (now Mary the National Council of Social Service Ward House) pioneered play-work and (now NCVO), formed the New Estates set up the first play centres in London. Committee. Thanks to the Housing Act It also established a model school for of 1936, it was able to obtain funds from children with physical disabilities. The the rates, and thanks to the Carnegie Women’s University Settlement (now the Trust it was able to provide ninety-two
A history of community asset ownership 79 community centres and draw up plans for The Brynmawr Experiment - eighty-two more. In 1945 the national the first development trust Federation of Community Associations Few places suffered more in the was established, now known as Great Depression of the late 1920s and Community Matters.61 early 1930s than Brynmawr in South Wales. A few years earlier the closure The settlements were platforms for of collieries had devastated the local experiment, enquiry and debate. Lenin economy, and soon poverty was severe attended a debate at Toynbee Hall, by any standards: gardens and Guglielmo Marconi held one of his allotments were abandoned for lack of earliest experiments in radio there, and seeds, pets were given up for lack of Pierre de Coubertin was so impressed food, public services were reduced to a by the mixing and working together minimum, and shops closed down of so many people from different nations because customers were unable to pay that it inspired him to establish the for their goods. Hunger marchers took to modern Olympic Games. Ghandi stayed the road to Newport. The town of at Kingsley Hall for three months in 1931, Brynmawr was slowly starving.63 while conducting negotiations with the British over the future of India. In 1888 Jane In response to the national emergency Addams and Ellen Gates Starr visited and in particular to help the people of Toynbee Hall and on their return to the Brynmawr, a branch of the Society of United States they established a similar Friends (the Quakers) in Worthing set up project, Hull House, in Chicago. The a Coalfields Distress Committee. Their Settlement Movement grew rapidly both in plan was to alleviate unemployment by Britain, the United States and the rest of developing light industry, and in 1929 the world, and the International Federation a Quaker couple, Peter and Lillian Scott, of Settlements and Neighbourhood launched the Order of Friends, based Centres was founded in 1926.62 on the principle that work should be controlled by the hands of those engaged in it, and began the Brynmawr Experiment. A community council was set up in Brynmawr to direct activities, and a community survey was undertaken. Local labour was organised to build a
80 Development Trusts Association Courtesy: Brynmawr and District Museum Society Brynmawr Courtesy:
swimming bath and paddling pool, and In 1931 Brynmawr and Clydach Valley to repair roads, with local men giving Industries Limited was formed as an their service in exchange for a midday umbrella group to create and manage meal. A Subsistence Production Society local enterprises and provide work. An supplied seeds and manure for allotments. appeal was made and stock was issued Some of the most malnourished children in hopes of raising £15,000, and by were housed with families in Worthing for July 1932, £10,000 had been collected. a few months to help them recuperate. Capital for new companies was raised Sympathisers in Worthing raised £1,600 by issuing shares to the workers in the for a distress fund. A building was taken form of loans from the umbrella group. over as a Community House and became Surpluses produced by the companies the base for welfare and social activities would repay the loans and control of the including a citizen’s advice bureau and company would end up in the hands of over twenty different youth clubs. the shareholders, the workers themselves.
A history of community asset ownership 81 Courtesy: Brynmawr and District Museum Society Brynmawr Courtesy:
Two enterprises, Brynmawr Bootmakers however, sales declined. It became Ltd and Brynmawr Furniture Makers Ltd impossible to import materials, and the began production at a converted brewery, furniture enterprise was forced to close. Gwalia Works. The furniture was designed The Brynmawr Bootmakers survived, by the talented Paul Matt on minimalist winning army contracts during the war Quaker and Arts and Craft principles and becoming fully self-financing. and quickly established a nationwide reputation. Marketing was undertaken Peter and Lillian Scott also inspired a on the most advanced principles, and small self-sustaining community at through promotional leaflets, glossy Upholland near Wigan, where members catalogues and a London showroom, were credited according to hours the company sold its message of high worked and commodities were priced quality product and social value. After the accordingly, reviving the time bank outbreak of the Second World War, schemes of Josiah Warren and Robert
82 Development Trusts Association Owen a hundred years earlier. The price their labour and barter surplus goods of goods was carefully calculated, taking among themselves, without suffering into account capital outlay, cost of deductions in their dole money. Despite production and estimated yields. For initial hostility from the local Labour example a jar of jam was assessed at party, trade unions and shopkeepers 2 hours and 15 minutes. (some participants were stoned on their way to work) the schemes won many Encouraged by the results at Brynmawr admirers, above all from the unemployed and Upholland, the government themselves. The Brynmawr Experiment supported a rapid expansion of the became a source of inspiration for the Subsistence Production Society from Land Settlement Association.64 1934 to 1938. In the Welsh valleys hundreds of acres were acquired at Llandegveth, Beili Glas, Trevethin, The development Pontymoile, Griffithstown, Pontnewydd trusts movement and Cwnbran and Cwnavon. In Lancashire In the 1940s and 1950s there were high sites were established at Billinge, Parbold hopes that state action (municipal housing, Hall, Pemberton and Standish, supported town planning, nationalisation of key by a grant of £30,000 from the Nuffield industries, universal education, health and Trust. Commercial activities ranged from welfare services) would eradicate poverty animal husbandry and market gardening and social inequality. The achievements to tailoring, cobbling, butchery, baking, were indeed huge, but in the 1970s and and woodworking. In 1938 the Welsh 1980s came a devastating critique from Valleys Subsistence Production Society the community development movement: recorded production of 242,590 pints of municipal welfarism was creating a milk, 38,500lbs meat, 360 yards of dependency culture and failing the poor. blankets, and 69,499 concrete bricks. In 1992 the Development Trusts Altogether around 900 people, mainly Association was founded by a small group men, took part in the schemes in Wales of strong-willed community practitioners. and Lancashire. They remained on Some had cut their teeth in the community unemployment benefit and were not paid, development or co-operative movement. but could take home the product of Others looked overseas to CDCs
A history of community asset ownership 83 (Community Development Corporations) enabling rural communities with a in the United States and to the ideas of population of less than 10,000 to community activists such as Saul Alinsky, establish a community body and register whose Rules for Radicals (1971) set out an interest in land or buildings, thereby tactics for community groups to use providing the option to buy when the against opponents vastly superior in power land/buildings come up for sale, following and wealth. Many were also inspired by the a community ballot. At the same time work of Paddy Doherty in Northern Ireland, a Scottish Land Fund was established who founded the cross-sectarian Inner City to assist communities to own and Trust in Derry at the height of the Troubles, develop land, by funding preparatory and demonstrated that community asset costs, acquisition, and development. development could be achieved in the While the legislation has proved most adverse circumstances. cumbersome to apply, its very existence gave encouragement to many rural Development trusts were determined that communities, especially in the Highlands regeneration should be community-led. and Islands, and a series of community They were also convinced that enterprise land buy-outs has taken place. and assets were the means to sustainable regeneration. Acquisition of land and In England in 2003 the government buildings would provide the foundation issued a General Disposal Consent to for community-based economic activities, local authorities and certain other public where profits would be reinvested in social bodies allowing them to dispose of goals. This would restore self-determination, land and buildings to community groups pride and prosperity to communities at less than ‘best consideration’ (ie at where the public and private sectors less than full market price) without the had failed. Gradually these principles requirement for Secretary of State consent, were put into practice and a nationwide provided that the undervalue was no more network of skills and experience than £2m, and that commensurate benefits developed, with development trusts of social, economic or environmental drawing knowledge and inspiration from well-being will be produced.65 the many successes, and occasional failures, of other development trusts. In 2004 the government provided £2m In Scotland the Land Reform Act 2003 to the Adventure Capital Fund, a new introduced a ‘community right to buy’ community investment initiative
84 Development Trusts Association established by a consortium including There has been keen interest in the Development Trusts Association, community land trust models in recent to provide patient capital (mixing grants, years, partly because community loans and quasi-equity finance) ownership of land, where increase in accompanied by business support for land value is retained for community community enterprises. By 2007 a total benefit rather than for private gain, has of £15m was raised by the Adventure been offered as a solution to the problem Capital Fund from government of affordable housing. Aside from a departments and regional development few examples within the development agencies. In some English regions similar trusts movement and elsewhere, funds were also established, notably often small in scale, practice has to date the Yorkshire Key Fund. The Big Lottery fallen short of aspiration. Fund and independent charitable trusts (notably Northern Rock Foundation, A hundred and fifty years after the Chase Lankelly Foundation, Esmee Chartists and the early trade unionists first Fairbairn Foundation, Carnegie UK showed the way, the idea of attracting Foundation, Tudor Trust) and commercial finance for community asset ownership banks (eg NatWest/RBS and Unity Trust initiatives from within communities Bank) have also assisted community themselves, through community bond and asset ownership initiatives. share issues, has re-emerged.67
In 2006 the Treasury issued guidance In 2006 at its national conference the to government departments and other Development Trusts Association issued public authorities on ‘clawback’ rules, a challenge to government to increase making it clear that where public funds the momentum of asset transfer to had been used to purchase or redevelop communities, and as a result Barry Quirk, community assets, conditions of grant chief executive of Lewisham Council should be applied in ways that, while and the local government ‘efficiency safeguarding public interest, should avoid champion’, was appointed to undertake a reducing the viability of the asset, for review of community management and example its potential to be used as ownership of assets. The Quirk review collateral for further asset development, was launched in 2007 at the Burton or for generating earned income for Street Project, a development trust in community benefit.66 Sheffield (which with the help of the
A history of community asset ownership 85 Adventure Capital Fund and Sheffield While the path to community asset City Council now owns its community ownership has never been easy nor building). The Quirk review noted free of obstacles, recent progress has that community asset development been encouraging. The DTA’s survey in was a means to achieve community 2008 showed that there are now over empowerment, and concluded: 450 development trusts across the UK, with a combined turnover of £240m There are risks but they can be and assets in community ownership of minimised and managed – there is £489m, serving a quarter of the entire plenty of experience to draw on. The population.69 Alongside colleagues in the secret is all parties working together.68 wider community sector and social enterprise sector, development trusts are Subsequently government provided keeping alive the simple and profound £30m for a Community Assets Fund ideas of a tradition that has endured for administered by the Big Lottery Fund, more than six hundred years. to promote asset transfer from local authorities. Government has also worked with the professional associations to improve technical guidance, and has funded ‘Advancing Assets’, a programme of advice for local authorities and their community partners, led by the Development Trusts Association. In 2008 the government announced the creation of an Asset Transfer Unit, based at the Development Trusts Association. Also in 2008, stimulated by the initiatives in Scotland and England, the Welsh Assembly commissioned a study on community asset transfer from DTA Wales.
86 Development Trusts Association Further reading
I have drawn extensively from the following sources – all are highly recommended:
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961. G E Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution, 1975. Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987. Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments 1325 – 1945, 2001. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, 1957. Co-operative website: www.archive.co-op.ac.uk/pioneers. Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England,1979 Dennis Hardy, Community Experiments 1900-1945, 2000. George Jacob Holyoake, History of Co-operation, 1875, rev ed 1905. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1972. Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 1987 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century, 1983. E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, revised ed 1968.
A history of community asset ownership 87 1. Villeins were the most common type of 18. Thomas Spence: Rights of Infants, 1797. serf in the Middle Ages, renting a house and 19. Thomas Spence, Description land, required to farm the land of the lord as of Spensonia, 1795. well as their own, and forbidden to move 20. William Blake, London, in Songs away without the lord’s consent. of Experience, 1794. 2. Edward Hall, The Union of the 21. E. P.Thompson, 'London' in Witness Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre Against the Beast: William Blake and and York, 1542. the Moral Law (1993). 3. John Stow and E Howes, Annales 22. Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: of England, London 1632, p 890. The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 1987. 4. Also see www.newtonrebels.org.uk. 23. William Blake, Jerusalem, c. 1815, 5. Richard Overton, An Arrow Against all plate 27. Tyrants, 1646. 24. Robert Owen, Address to the 6. ‘Certain Articles for the Good of the Inhabitants of New Lanark, 1816. Commonwealth’ in Appeale from the 25. Alfred Russell Wallace, Studies Degenerate Representative Body, 1647. Scientific and Social, 1900. 7. John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas 26. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication Prince, Richard Overton, An Agreement of of the Rights of Men, 1790. the Free People of England, 1649. 27. Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants, 1797 8. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll, 1649, 28. Quoted in Barbara Taylor, Eve and the I, 2.3 in Abiezer Coppe, Selected Writings, New Jerusalem: Socialism and feminism in ed. Andrew Hopton, 1987. the nineteenth century, 1983, p 150. 9. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll, 1 29. Letter from William Thompson to Anna 649, II, 2.6; 6.2. Wheeler, 1825, quoted in Barbara Taylor, p ix 10. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll, 30. Barbara Taylor, pp 238-260. 1649, II, 5.5; 7.1; 8.9. 31. Although it was not the first co-operative 11. Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers store; one was set up by the Weavers' Standard Advanced, or The State of Society at Fenwick in Ayrshire as early Community Opened, and Presented to the as 1769. Sons of Men, April 20 1649. 32. Common Sense, 11 December 1830. 12. Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law 33. The full text of the Laws and Objects of Righteousness, 1649. of the Rochdale Society of Equitable 13. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Pioneers, 1844, is available at Freedom in a Platform, 1652. www.archive.co-op.ac.uk/pioneers. 14. Thomas Spence, The Constitution of 34. George Jacob Holyoake, History of a Perfect Commonwealth, 1798. Co-operation, 1875, rev ed 1905, chapters 15. Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants, 1797. 15 and 16. See also George Jacob 16. Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Holyoake, Self-help by the People: the Society to its Natural State, 1801. history of the Rochdale pioneers, 1858, 17. Robert Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to tenth edition 1892. the Root, 1817 35. W H G Armytage, Heavens Below:
88 Development Trusts Association Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 50. W H G Armytage, pp. 342-358. 1961, pp. 246 and 254-258. 51. Henry George, Progress and 36. See Alice Mary Hadfield, The Chartist Poverty, 1879, 1.15 Land Company, 1970, reprinted 2000. 52. Progress and Poverty, VII.II.2 37. Feargus O’Connor, A Practical Work on 53. Progress and Poverty, VIII.II. 9,10,12 the Management of Small Farms, 1843. 54. Progress and Poverty, IX, IV.6 38. For example George Jacob Holyoake, 55. PW Huntsman, ‘The Community Self-help by the People: the history of the Land Act of 1975’ in Farm Management Rochdale pioneers, tenth ed 1892: ‘We are 3:174-183, 1976/77. bound to relate that the capital of the Store 56. See V H Blundell, ‘Labour’s Flawed would have increased somewhat more Land Acts 1947-1976’, rapidly, had not many of its members at www.landvaluetax.org/labour01. that time been absorbed by the land 57. Estates Gazette, 2 April 1977, quoted company of Feargus O'Connor.’ in V H Blundell, ‘Labour’s Flawed Land 39. Joseph Rowntree, ‘Memorandum’, (1904) Acts 1947-1976’. 40. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, 1851, 58. Wyndham Thomas, ‘A review of sets out an argument in favour of common development land taxes in Britain since ownership of land; but Spencer said the 1947’ in Peter Bill (ed.) Building sustainable way forward was not through small communities: capturing land development communities as advocated by Robert Owen value for the public realm, The Smith and others but rather though ‘the joint stock Institute, 2004. ownership of the public’, ie nationalisation. 59. J. A. R. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall: Fifty years 41. James Silk Buckingham, National Evils of social progress 1884-1934, 1935. and Practical Remedies, 1848. 60. See www.bassac.org.uk. 42. Edward Bellamy, Looking 61. Raymond Clarke (ed.), Enterprising Backward, 1888. Neighbours: The development of 43. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan the Community Association Movement in Pier, 1937. Britain, 1990. See also 44. William Morris, News from www.communitymatters.org.uk. Nowhere, 1890. 62. See www.ifsnetwork.org. 45. William Morris, True and False Society, 63. See Hilda Jennings, Brynmawr: quoted E P Thompson, William Morris: A Study of a Distressed Area, 1934. Romantic to Revolutionary, 1955, 64. Jeffrey L. Thomas, ‘Decline and revised ed 1977 p. 688. Depression in the 1920s: 46. William Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, The Brynmawr Experiment’ at Commonweal, June 22nd 1889. www.thomasgenweb.com/brynmawr_ 47. Commonweal (4 May 1889). experiment. 48. E P Thompson, The Making of 65. The Local Government Act 1972: the English Working Class, 1963, General Disposal Consent (England) revised ed 1968.p 727. 2003 Circular 06/2003. 49. See Armytage pp 305-315. 66. Improving financial relationships with
A history of community asset ownership 89 the third sector: Guidance to funders and purchasers, HMSO 2006. 67. Chris Hill, Community Share and Bond Issues: The sharpest tool in the box, DTA, 2007. 68. Making Assets Work: the Quirk review of community management and ownership of public assets, HMSO 2006. 69. See the DTA website for the Development Trusts Association annual survey and for recent examples of community asset development: www.dta.org.uk.
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